Personal site of journalist, baker, and storyteller Tony Ganzer.
Except here I sit, in Zurich, and the taste of strawberry ice cream is still faintly, and expensively, on my lips.
It comes over you immediately after disembarking the subway–the pressure to maintain your cool as the Parenting Game begins. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to play. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t know there is a game going on.
But as the groups of families and friends rush faster and faster toward the exit, hoping to be first to pay 9 Euros to enter the zoo, you realize there is something odd here. People stare you up and down, judging you with their eyes. They look at your baby stroller and then look at their own…they must have spent 1 or 200 Euros more on their stroller and smirk with superiority.
Visiting the zoo is supposed to be a time to relax and observe animals in their natural (man-made) habitats…but our visit today turned more into a sad study into the human condition.
Our trip to the zoo was prompted by a few things, the most important and relevant being our young man’s newly-found interest in animals, and communicating with them. See a bird, and want to say something? “Caw, caw” he’ll answer. See a lion? “Rawr.” And perhaps you see a dog, or any other animal? “Bow wow” is the default, universal language for all things animal.
Continue reading “The Zoo and the Parenting Game”
With this Spring I will have experienced all 4 seasons in Europe. That seen only on a calendar means little…but in reality, I consider it a feat worth noting.
I saw a guy experiencing homelessness this morning, and I have seen him before.
Often he has a shopping cart with 4 or 5 suitcases on it. He dresses in brown, or maybe his suit jacket is just covered with the product of months or years of street life.
There were no suit cases this morning.
The man sat against the base of a concrete box in the train station, rocking with his hands between his thighs for warmth.
My cheeks were pierced with cold, so his must’ve been numb–his beard looked thin and disheveled, not helpful.
His rocking was sad; his posture like a vertical fetal position wishing for the comfort of the womb.
[An expanded version of this essay appears in my book Kneading Journalism]
Continue reading “Back to Reality”
“Sure!”
Four hours later we arrived in Munich, and loaded a taxi. Our new home was waiting, and, now, the glass cathedral has a new place to glow and spin.
