One summer day when I was three years old (that would be 1950), my father’s two unmarried sisters (that would be Aunt Mae and Aunt Blanche) took their nieces and nephews (that would be me and my brother and our two cousins) to Brookfield Zoo. We saw a lot of animals, but there are two particular sights etched in my memory. One was a large elephant in the Pachyderm Building that was shackled by one of its hind legs to the wall. And the other was the place where the seals lived.
There was a footbridge that crossed above what was apparently intended to approximate the seals’ natural habitat. It consisted of a large pool of water surrounded by rock formations which actually looked to me like giant slabs of concrete. (It might not have been that crude, but this was three years before anybody figured out how bad my eyesight was.) Visitors could stand on the bridge and look over its pipe railing to watch the seals at play.
Which is what I was doing – leaning through the railing rather than over it, since I was so small – when I suddenly threw up all over the seals below me.
I remember Aunt Blanche talking on a pay phone to one or the other of my parents about what had happened and what should be done. Probably the zoo visit ended early.
Now, in those days, it was not unusual for me to suddenly throw up for no apparent reason. This had already been diagnosed – it was, of course, tonsillitis. The tonsils would swell, and I would gag, and emesis ensued. Simple as that. Surgery had been deferred because I was so young, but after the zoo incident, my folks decided enough was enough, and a tonsillectomy was performed in September, a couple months shy of my fourth birthday. Once the tonsils were gone, the vomiting stopped.
I was eight or nine years old, however, before I could be convinced that it wasn’t the seals that made me puke.
