Photo by Jorge Salvador on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper and Phyllis recently found themselves as virtually the only customers in a nearby JC Penny’s department store, and left finally when it became obvious that, not only were there no customers, there were no sales clerks either.
The keeper compared it to being in an abandoned zoo, which, like most everything in his current life triggered a memory, on this occasion of the time when he actually found himself in an abandoned zoo.
It was some 50 or 60 years ago, up in the sandy jack-pine part of Wisconsin, where a Madison doctor inexplicably stopped caring for dozens of caged creatures that were to have been part of a tourist attraction. When the keeper stumbled onto the site, the caged animals had been reduced to skeletons, except for a cluster of wild pigs that fed on the remains of their dead zoo partners, and a half dozen elk that broke through their fences and were later rounded up by Conservation wardens on snowmobiles.
The keeper seems to remember that the zoo owner claimed a misunderstanding with local people, who, in turn, said they had not been paid for feeding the animals.
It was a sad, bizarre story, and the keeper did not dwell on it long as he and Phyllis left Penny’s and went home to do some internet shopping. But there was a bothersome memory residue that pointed to what is possible when misunderstandings rage out of control amid life that seems to become more and more zoo-like on a daily basis.
