Summer 2020: A Soggy Pretzel With Too Much Salt

Love it or hate it — it’s all in your approach.

When I was young, summer felt like a thousand nights of sprinklers and ice cream sandwiches. Each day had the potential to be the greatest day ever and I was oblivious to the passing of time. Summer felt like one big picnic, where the only inconvenience was somebody’s mom grabbing you long enough to smear a new coat of sunscreen over your cheeks and nose.

Now that I’m older, summer seems a lot shorter than it used to. I know the calendar says July is 31 days long, but after I get my teeth cleaned, my oil changed in my car, and fit in a trip to the beach, I feel like the rest of the days have slipped between my fingers like sand.

I have a husband and two kids and we try to milk summer for all its worth. We pack the car, unpack the car, vacuum the sand, toss aside bedtime, spend too much money on fireworks and swim in the dark. It’s glorious when the kids fall asleep early, dots of sweat beading up on their noses, and we have a few minutes to put away our bikes, our boats, and our camping gear before collapsing in bed ourselves.

Of course, everything is different this summer.

This summer reminds me of my childhood. Instead of feeling it slip away too soon, I am acutely aware of each passing day. When I realized we haven’t spent a night away from our house in more than six months, I ordered new sheets for everyone.

My husband is sweet, so he calls it ‘therapy spending.’ I’m more realistic so I call it ‘ordering crap on the internet to feel better.’

Amazon boxes and delivery trucks can only go so far though, so this week, I decided I needed to get out of town.

My son is an animal lover, so I planned a short day trip to a small zoo and amusement ride park about an hour from our house. I’ll be an adult forever, but he’s only going to be three years old for one summer. I want to make sure he has enough opportunities to feed baby goats while he’s still young enough to want to.

We masked up and headed out of town. I paid our admission fee and we both put on those fluorescent bracelets that always remind me of college frat parties. There was a lady at the entrance whose sole job seemed to be to tell us loudly through her mask to ‘FOLLOW THE ARROWS.’

I thought I knew what to expect. There would be fewer people, some of the rides would be closed. We’d wear masks and keep our distance. No big deal.

I was not prepared for the park to be limping along, struggling to keep animals on display and leaving whole sections of the park to become abandoned and overgrown. In hindsight, it makes sense. Park admission pays staff, buys animal food, and keeps the place looking nice. I get it. But it was still worse than I had expected.

At the attendant’s instruction, we followed the arrows along an overgrown fence to the first animal. There was another family in front of us, so we respectfully waited for them to move on before we stepped up. While we waited, my son guess what we would see — a rhinoceros? A bear? a dragon?

I played along, knowing that reality would be a disappointment compared to his imagination. Indeed, when we reached the fence, there were two hubcap-sized tortoises laying motionless on the ground.

“Are they dead?” Chapman asked.

“No, they’re just resting,” I assured him as I stared intently at them looking for a blink or the rise of a breath. Nothing. Untouched bowls of food sat off to the side. When the people behind us started edging us out of the space, we moved on.

Next stop was an area with a handful of exotic birds in it, and I kid you not, there was a male peacock who was so bedraggled he only had two tailfeathers. I was embarrassed to look at him. It was like walking past a toothless homeless person in the street, except you’ve just shelled out $40 for the privilege of staring at him.

While animals in zoos present several moral and ethical issues, I usually find them delightful enough that I can still enjoy myself and shove down the icky feeling I have in my stomach for another day.

But today, it wasn’t just seeing the animals that left me full of questions. Half of the enclosures were empty and overgrown, which made me wonder — where are the animals?

Even stranger, at the duck pond, where you can pay a quarter for a teaspoonful of duck food, there were about a hundred ducks and they were all female. Which, of course, begs the question: where are the boy ducks?

I really tipped over though, when we came to an empty tiger enclosure with a laminated information sheet clipped to the front with biner clips. It explained that a beloved, long-time resident of the park, a white Bengal tiger, had recently passed away. The paper included a link and asked guests to ‘make a donation to the park’.

A donation for what?!? To buy another tiger?!?

I felt an emotional whiplash as I read the sign and realized that six months have passed since I watched Tiger King on Netflix. At the time, I shook my head at Joe Exotic, safe in my opinion that Covid-19 would be a memory by August.

But here I am, my son’s sweaty hand in mine, both of us breathing heavily through our masks. He wants to know if the dead tiger is in heaven. I don’t want to talk about it, but it’s the only exhibit where there are no other people, so it’s nice to pause for a moment and contemplate.

When we pause, I take a second to really look at him. Even though I’ve been in his company every single day since the world shut down, I don’t spend a lot of time taking him in. It’s 99 degrees, and he’s wearing a mask just as normally as he would wear a baseball hat. His knees are scraped and scabbed just like they would be in a normal summer. I can’t see his mouth, but his forehead wrinkles with curiosity when he asks me questions and I love him as fiercely as a tiger mom loves her tiger cub.

We stroll past another empty cage to the concession stand and order a giant pretzel. We sanitize our hands while we wait. A lady slides our pretzel out under a slot in the plexiglass shield that must make it feel like a thousand degrees inside.

We take the pretzel to an empty set of bleachers in the shade. Usually, crowds of people file in and out of them every two hours to watch a corny animal show that you can’t help but laugh at. Today, they are all ours and my son climbs up on the bottom row, traversing all the way across before stepping up to the second row and so on.

He meets me on the fourth row and I hand him a piece of the pretzel. It is disgusting. It’s soggy like it was dipped in a puddle and then microwaved. It’s been salted so heavily the salt grains form a little peak on the top.

I shrug apologetically and tell him he can just brush it off the extra if he wants.

And then I am reminded of what summer feels like when you are a kid. Summer is a thousand days of trips with your mom, soggy pretzels, and empty bleachers. Summer is long and wonderful and it doesn’t matter if you had to cancel your plans to stay at a condo on the Cape or not.

My son grabbed the pretzel and ate it with gusto. He sang. He danced. He played on the bleachers. He looked up at the sky and waved and said, “I wish you were still here dead tiger!” He came back and asked for more pretzel.

My heart broke for how sad I felt at our pitiful little outing and for how happy and oblivious he was to everything that should have been this summer. My heart broke to think that he won’t always be delighted by a trip to a crappy animal park and a disappointing pretzel.

But I also felt good because he felt good. I realized that I’ve spent the whole summer feeling so upset that I’ve missed the good moments. Upset about — well everything, really. And I could have been upset about the bad food, the missing boy ducks and how depressing the whole park was, with the rides closed and the gardens neglected.

But my son was happy, so I decided to be happy too. I ripped off a piece of pretzel and at it. And guess what? It wasn’t that bad.

There are three weeks of summer left. And even though there’s a lot to be upset about, they don’t have to be terrible. There might not be vacations and parties, but there’s still ice cream and sprinklers. And bad pretzels.

And maybe, for now, that’s enough.