West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

As the country teeters between a depression and Europe’s looming war, a pair of giraffes, survivors of a hurricane at sea, left a wake of much-needed cheer while driven cross-country to the San Diego Zoo, where lady zoo director Mrs. Belle Benchley awaited.’”

“Way I heard it, the gent who started up the zoo from a menagerie after the Great War rang up civil service for a bookkeeper since they barely had money for a keeper much less a staff. She showed up and started doing everything from taking tickets to nursing sick animals until she was running the place.

If home, like Red said, was not where you came from but where you wanted to be, then the rig, the Old Man, and the giraffes were more home—and more family—than any home I’d ever had. For a stray orphaned boy, this home seemed fiercely worth holding on to, with both fists, as long as I could. No matter what might be waiting for me up the road.

The land you grow up in is a forever thing, remembered when all else is forgotten, whether it did you right or did you wrong. Even when it flat near kills you. Even when it invades your dreams and stokes your nightmares. Even when you run from it never to return, then find yourself headed straight back for it, and the best you can wish for is to drive through it with your head down and your wits about you, dodging the worst of it so you can get on with your young life somewhere else.

The thing about knowing you’re doing something for the last time is that it takes the joy right out of it. I’ve done lots of things for the last time in my long life, but I didn’t know it. This time I’d know it.

It’s a strange thing how you can spend years with some folks and never know them, yet, with others, you only need a handful of days to know them far beyond years.