The Gates of Hogle Zoo

Have you ever woken up from a dream thinking that it wasn’t really a dream, but was somehow a play back from events in your life?  Well that is the best way to describe how my mind saw my early childhood. Nothing seemed real and I couldn’t remember anything from my early years.  It was as if the years never existed, yet I knew they were there. I had brief moments of remembrance, but then never knew if they were real memories or ones my mind made up to make itself feel better for forgetting the truth.

Here I was living with my grandmother, no longer on the demon ‘candies’ and starting to deal with the emotions of my dark past.  “Deal with”, I use lightly as at this point it was unknown to anyone, including myself, that I had had any abuse other then the abandonment from my biological parents.  I was dealing with the thoughts of, “why me?”, “why wasn’t I good enough?”, “what did I do wrong?” and countless other thoughts of worthlessness.  A mother would never leave her child, so what did I do wrong? Did my father think I was a waste?

These questions haunted me day in and day out through out my young childhood and even into my teen years.  Even though my life had started to have some type of normality to it, I felt a huge whole like I was missing something, something that nothing could fill and no one could patch.  My fits and out bursts began to become more violent and more dangerous to myself and those around me.  To top it off, I began to have headaches that would land me in the emergency room overnight and would linger with me for days.  Through all of this, the true journey of my life was about to begin.  Here is where I would find out who I was and who I was going to become.  But first I was about to ‘re-meet’ my biological mother in a circus of events that would leave me motivated and driven for years to come.

As I stated in an earlier chapter my grandmother was given ‘temporary custody’ of me, meaning that she wasn’t legally my adopted parent and at any given time if my biological parents emerged from their cocoons of selfishness, they could claim me as their own.  I later found out that this was the greatest fear of my grandmother’s, that someday after all she would do for me I would be thrown back into the arms of a mother and father that had once so easily tossed me aside.

I was now in third grade school and enjoyed pancakes nearly every morning.  I got to ride the big yellow bus to school, while at school I had windows that looked out to play grounds and not hospital parking lots.  I had my own room with ninja sheets and my door was made of wood, not the cold white metal that had trapped me before. Even with all this I was battling the normal challenges of fitting in as a young boy in a new school.  As well as coming to grips with the life that I once had lived.  I was the king of time outs in my grandmother’s living room and in school I had a permanent place in the corner of the room due to my constant fighting and emotional out bursts. To say life was normal would be a stretch, but then again what truly is normal?

It felt as if my mind was a blank.  All I could remember of my young childhood where those memories of the Red Brick walls, of skating in circles at the 49th Street Gallery, crafts, machines testing me, the smell of the hospital food and my beloved shiny quarters.  My childhood, for me, didn’t have memories of a mother or even brothers or sisters.  My mind had shielded and protected itself from the horrors it had endured.  I was protected, I was safe, yet I knew something wasn’t right.

All the other boys in the school had mothers that they would greet them as they exited the yellow school bus. Mothers that would come to class with them during projects.  Fathers that would come and share stories of work and life.  I had my grandmother and each day there was someone around me that reminded me that I wasn’t ‘normal’, that I didn’t have a mother and I was ‘weird’.  Yes, the joys of public school.  I had very few friends and only remember one friend, who I will name Josh for the purposes of this online book.  Josh was the only friend I truly remember having during my first years of public school.

Josh had a normal family and never really asked about my family.  Never cared why I didn’t have a dad or why my grandmother was old.  Never cared to ask why I just ‘showed up’ one day, he just truly was a friend.  Josh and I would spend hours playing in the neighborhood imagining all types of boyish things.  Cops and robbers, Indians and Cowboys and any other imaginary thing two boys could conjure up.  Josh helped me feel ‘normal’.

It had been three years now since I had seen my mother and truly I didn’t remember her nor did I remember anything about her.  This all changed in a blink of an eye.  Josh and I were out playing in my grandmother’s front yard when a red square car stopped across the street and sat there, for what Josh and I thought was hours.  We tried not to notice the car or the eyes that would follow us as we ran around the yard.  Then the car door open, and out step a woman who came towards Josh and I.  Now, Josh and I had not been friends for very long, but it was as if we were in each other’s minds.  In one breath we both screamed and ran into my home.

My grandmother heard us and ran to the front door.  From here we were both too busy hiding under the bed to know what was going on at the front door.  My grandmother spoke softly at the woman standing in the door and then we heard the door slam and the bolt lock.  My grandmother called us both to her and she asked if we would like to watch a movie or help her in the kitchen. Nothing else was said.

The next day I woke up, got ready for school, but something was about this morning different.  My grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table.  There were no pancakes, no breakfast for that matter and a somber feeling filled the air.  My grandmother handed me a piece of paper and said, “Have fun today sweetie, I hope you see a lion!” I looked down at the paper and quickly everything else was a blur.  Across the top read, “Lowland Elementary School Field Trip Permission Slip, Hogle Zoo”.  That is right, I was going to the Zoo!

Lions and tigers and bears oh my, something I had never seen before and only dreamed about!  I was about to see gorillas, hippos, monkeys and giraffes!  The events from yesterday had left my mind.  My grandmother reached to the table and handed me a banana and a small bag of granola as well as my little brown sacked lunch.  She then whisked me out the front door and waived as I ran to our block’s bus stop.

The bus was full of giggling and excited children as we all knew what adventures we were about to have.  Josh was already on the bus and had saved me my seat right next to him.  All we talked about on the way into school was all the animals we were about to see and how cool this day was going to be.  Even with all the excitement of my first Zoo trip, I had no idea what adventure was waiting for me at the gates of Hogle Zoo.