Better Than the Bronx Zoo
I never cared much for the phrase “maintaining the status quo”. As a child, it was because I never wanted to believe that change was even possible. As an adult, it’s because I know change to be inevitable.
You will witness some extraordinary changes during your lifetime. People will enter and leave your world. Sports stadiums you visited as a child will be torn down so that new ones can be built. Even the face you see in the mirror will one day look back at you in disbelief. Yes, the person staring back at you will eventually have wrinkles and gray hair.
The idea of trying to keep everything the same as it once was is a futile endeavor. So why do we as humans fight to maintain a status quo, when we know that all things change with time?
A few weeks ago in my story titled You were happiest when, I urged you to find what makes you happy in life. As a follow-up, I offer to you another memory from conversing with my grandfather. This time I urge you to continue doing what makes you happy, no matter how old you get and how much things change. For privacy purposes the names included here have been altered.
My grandfather, sitting in the chair next to me, started rattling them off: “Larry Resh, Morris Bernstein, Harold Kaden, Stanley Rosen… even Alan Ziegler.” Many of his oldest friends, and almost all of the people who had attended his wedding, have since passed on.
I guess it’s to be expected. When you are fortunate enough to live to be 87 year’s old, you are also almost assuredly unfortunate enough to have dealt with a great amount of loss.
The last name my mentioned caught my attention. For decades Alan was one of my grandfather’s closest friends. Alan Ziegler was someone I remembered.
When I was a kid and my family went out to dinner with Alan and his wife, Alan would invent little games to keep me entertained. The one I enjoyed most was spinning the cork from a wine bottle to try to get it to balance half on the table and half off the table. Dinners were always long, and as a child, they seemed to last forever. Alan helped make the meal fun though. He was such a likable, kind person.
I asked my grandfather how Alan died.
A few years after Alan’s wife passed away, he started dating another woman. Alan also spent his remaining golden years traveling the world. His heart always longed for adventure, as evidenced by his successful pursuit of a pilot’s license. Alan hoped for many years to one day go on an African safari. In particular, he wanted to see the African animals.
It was in his late-seventies, that Alan decided the time was right to make the African safari dream a reality. My grandfather did not think this newest idea for adventure was a good one.
“What do you need to go to Africa for? You can get an infection. You can be bitten by a mosquito and get a disease. If you want to see animals go to the Bronx zoo.” Alan brushed off the advice from his dear friend Jerry.
A week or so into his safari, my grandfather received devastating news from Alan’s girlfriend. The fearless traveler suffered a massive heart attack while in Africa. Alan didn’t survive.
Alan’s girlfriend told my grandfather that she had spoken with Alan a few days before he died. During that phone call he said to her,
“Tell Jerry this is better than the Bronx zoo”.
My grandfather finished the story, and I could see his eyes drifting back into his memory bank, perhaps remembering the last time he saw his old friend. My grandfather stood by his original position that Alan should never have traveled to Africa.
I quickly contested that the heart attack might have happened at any time. It could have happened anywhere too. It seemed admirable to me that Alan did what he wanted to do, despite being at a point in life when most people take it easy.
My grandfather held the belief that if the heart attack happened in New York and his friend had been brought to an American hospital, Alan might have received better care. Perhaps he would have even survived. This was certainly a possibility, and it was a logical reasoning that I hadn’t thought of.
Truthfully though, nobody can ever know what would have happened if Alan had the heart attack in New York instead of Africa. As much as we would like to, we can’t play out the many “if scenarios” we think of.
Still, I felt sorry for my grandfather, recalling this sad but beautiful memory of his free spirited friend. I sat there a while longer thinking about Alan, and kept coming back to that poetic line his girlfriend relayed to my grandfather.
I kept repeating that line over and over again in my head. Finally I came to one conclusion: Some things in life are worth taking risks even when friends and family think otherwise. Our ability to make our own decisions enables us to determine how old we feel and what we are able to accomplish.
You won’t be able to maintain the status quo. All things change with time. However you can battle anyway. You have the power to decide what makes life worth living, regardless of how many candles are on the birthday cake.
Alan decided that he was going to Africa. By making that decision an old man worn by age and by his own personal losses was able to be a kid one final time. He went on a new adventure and saw big, beautiful animals in the wild. To Alan… it was better than the Bronx zoo.
