The Brookfield Zoo made a grand announcement yesterday.
The zoo has been around for ninety years and they plan to expand as they reach the century mark. A five hundred million dollar project that will utilize the entire space that they own.
The best part of it for me is the return of elephants. It has probably been twenty years since the last elephant nervously roamed in my neighborhood.
My last memory is of an old tired pachyderm shuffling back and forth like a mental patient. Probably because captivity was torture for an animal that needs to roam thirty miles a day.
When I was a little boy, Brookfield had an elephant named Ziggy. Ziggy nearly killed his trainer in the early forties and was chained to a wall until the late sixties.
Ziggy was a vegetable by the time I met him in the early seventies. I only knew him for a few visits before he died in 1975. I kept his Mold-a-Rama on my dresser for years after.
When I was a kid, a small steam locomotive pulled a Choo Choo around the zoo. Coming from a railroad family, the train was my favorite part of the day. The last train under steam was in 1985 and very little is left from its footprint around the complex. Though, I can still hear and see it when I close my eyes.
The zoo had a fake mountain side that we called Baboon Island. A large drop off and tall wall kept the dozens of primates safely away from the crowd.
The facility was shut down shortly into the new millennium and turned into a generic gazebo for educational purposes only.
Kids today will never get a chance to see baboons having sex on the side of a mountain smack dab in the middle of Cook County.
The new plans don’t include the return of the steam locomotives or an island of poop throwing baboons, but elephants will be returning.
The plan is to put them on the furthest side of the zoo. I hope I’ll be able to hear them when I’m drinking my morning coffee on the balcony. I hope the rebuilding of the zoo doesn’t relocate Titus and Brutus. They are my lion neighbors who roar frequently during my morning Joe.
What am I worried about?
This whole restructuring won’t be done for twenty five years. If I’m lucky, I’ll get in a few visits before I join Ziggy up in heaven. I should be able to enjoy my feline friends for years to come.
I just had a magnificent daydream. When I enter into eternal rest, I want to do it on the Brookfield Zoo “Choo Choo twain.”
.... and as the train pulls into the heavenly station, my parents are waving to me just like they did over fifty years ago when I was a little boy.
The things that I’ve loved through my lifetime, the zoo across the river is one of them. Since the day I went for the first time with my mommy and daddy. The field trip in third grade with the nuns leading us. To returning these last eighteen years as a daddy and just last week…
…When I got my steps in as I walked from the D.D.D. to around the back of the zoo lake before returning back home. A great route to bang out 12,000 steps.
The weather on this Humpday is perfect. Eighty two and smiley.
Make sure to visit the Brookfield Zoo this summer. I always have an extra pass in my kitchen junk drawer if you need one.
