It’s interesting to live in a city with a zoo.
I hadn’t really noticed that until today. It has been a day off school for the kids and another family invited us to join them at the zoo. And it was wonderful.
Six kids, 3 parents and the whole day ahead of us, one of those perfect warm spring days that slips into the calendar in between all the rainy forecasts. We’d dressed the kids in layers of sweaters and raincoats in the morning and then spent the day pushing around a coat-laden stroller while the tee-shirted kids ran on ahead. The sun was warm and bright, the trees blossomed and the grass dry enough to sit on. At lunchtime, we were joined by the completing fourth parent for a picnic.
Sausage pie, carrots and celery, hard-boiled eggs, sourdough crackers. Popcorn cookies, a bottle of juice and coffee in a thermos. Chocolate when necessary. A good recipe for a good day.
It felt like such a gift to go out: out of our routine, out of the neighbourhood, out of the ordinary. There were plenty of chimpanzees and cheeky monkeys to watch, nesting penguins, sun bears and a sleepy porcupine hidden up in the fork of a tree. But the very best of the best was witnessing my Blue see a lion for the very first time. Magic. He’s mad about big cats, which has something to do with his budding naturalist tendencies (he keeps a well-thumbed reference book under his pillow at night) and something to do with the Narnia books we’ve been reading at bedtime. We’re set to read chapter 13 of The Last Battle tonight and he’s holding his breath for Aslan to work everything for the good. If you’ve read the Narnia books, you might remember that the last book is very, very bleak until quite close to end – which we almost are. It’s tense stuff. We need Aslan soon, very soon. I think so, and so does Blue.
He also thinks we need Aslan here in our neighbourhood. I told him that Aslan isn’t a tame lion, and wouldn’t fit in our backyard anyway but he was wonderful in the story, wasn’t he? Which felt like a rather lame parental answer even as I said. Blue just sighed.
“I wish Aslan were real.”
This time, I didn’t answer with anything other than a squeeze for his hand.
“And I wish we could go on an adventure.”
I reminded him about the hill we climbed recently.
“I mean a real adventure. With magic.”
Yes, my love. That would be wonderful. What more can you say? I don’t want to dull Narnia with too many words or explanations. So I hugged him as he hugged his yellow, quilted lion (thanks, Oma) and buried his head in the sofa cushions.
But then today at the zoo, he got to see a lion.
There was a raised walkway at the far end of the lions’ field which led to a small hut – something like a bird hide, but with large glass windows looking over the field. There were already a fair number of people there, and from how they were chatting away, I figured that there must be nothing to see. But I was wrong. There, maybe a third of the way down the field, was the lion. He lay on the sunny grass, facing away from us, tawny and tired, but after a moment or two, he rose to his feet, turned around and settled again, this time with his wonderful face looking our way. Gorgeous. Adjectives seem superfluous for a lion – he was all that he should be. Blue sat right down on the floor of the hut, eyes wide and his nose pressed against the glass, watching in adoration.
Adoration can be a difficult attitude for us adults – except perhaps when we are watching our children. To watch a much-loved child caught up in complete adoration becomes a moment of clarity. So this is love. This is what love looks like. What love feels like.
Later, Blue confided in me that his sister told him something amazing. She’d said that in the moment when the lion turned his mighty head towards us, she’d seen that he looked right at Blue and actually winked.
Again, love.
Now at home again, it’s beautiful to know that we’re in the same city as that marvellous face. Some evenings when the wind is right, we can hear the city’s church bells from our neighbourhood and maybe the lion can, too. He, too, is a part of our city, out there like the bells in the settling evening, still there as the day draws to a close and we draw curtains.
There is a poem by Ted Hughes about sitting at home and hearing the wolves howling in the London zoo. But for me, it’s the memory of Blue and his lion that will echo tonight. One moment in our full days, but a deep one, I think. A moment from our own real adventure and, yes, it is full of magic, my love, real magic because lions are real and lovely, real and living. Just like their maker, and just like you.
