Santa is watching, kids

Three stories from today's shift at the zoo, a place that can still provide anecdotes in the dead of winter.

1) I was talking with a middle-aged employee and at one point asked if she was from the Milwaukee area. She volunteered the exact street where she grew up, and it just happened to be the very same one I am living on -- just a block down from my house, in fact.

2) A chaperone came up to the counter and bought Twizzlers for the three or four school children crowding around her. While I rang up her order, she asked me if there was anything going on with Santa today. "No," I said, "Why do you ask?" She then told me she saw Santa and his wife walking down near the caribou. I said no, the zoo's Breakfast/Lunch with Santa isn't until the weekend. She smiled and left it at that.

I wonder now if she was making the whole thing up and expected me to reply with something like, "Oh yeah, he's just here looking for some new reindeer!" That would go along with the whole caribou thing. After all, there were kids around her, some of whom might still have been the believing age. I might have played along if I'd been quick enough, or if she'd given me more of a hint. Or maybe there was really someone dressed as Santa wandering around the zoo.

3) There is still one pay phone at the zoo. I have never, ever, seen it used. Today, as I was wiping off a counter in my restaurant, a zoo employee asked if I could keep an eye on some of the school children wandering around the building. Apparently, one of them had prank-called 911 from the pay phone. I wondered not where the kids' chaperones were, but instead why these whippersnappers were so desperate to get big lumps of coal in their stockings.