The poor man's zoo

Vicki was getting her hair done tonight, so I picked Samson up after work at his friend Jake's house. And since we needed cat food and litter, I figured we'd go do some shopping at Petsmart. He was thrilled with the wall of fishes that is their aquarium section. He's started saying "cool" when he sees things he likes, and these fish were definitely cool.

Not so cool was our next stop: the birds. Now I love to see birds in the wild, and nothing makes me happier than waking up in the morning and seeing a Cardinal on our deck or hearing the birds in the tree outside our window. But the satisfaction to be derived from birds as pets seems to fall somewhere between snakes (at least you can watch the big ones digesting things) and sea-monkeys. I just don't get the appeal.

In any event, we were watching the birds when one of the parakeets came right up to the bars on the cage and squawked and flapped his wings. For some reason this scared Samson, but he stopped himself from crying. It was weird. He had the bottom lip sticking out, and the eyes were starting to squint, but no tears. I took this as a cue to move on to get what we had actually come for and then go see the cats at the adoption center.

He showed way more interest in these cats, who were behind a plate glass window, than he ever shows in ours. Maybe we need to put a big Plexiglas screen between the two of them, and then Samson will take notice. It's not that he doesn't like Ishmael, it's just that, at times, it's almost as if he doesn't see him. He walked right over him yesterday. And as for the cat, while it's true that he had seven years of uninterrupted lolling around, you'd think the presence of an unsteady 20-pound, close-to-the ground walker would engender some kind of behavior modification. Not so; he remains as fixed (and inscrutable) as the Sphinx.

Somehow, among all this errand running and animal kingdom excitement, I didn't notice that Samson was only wearing one shoe. I realized this when I saw the other one on his carseat as we were headed home. Which was fine, since it wasn't lost, and it was warm tonight. Plus he had socks on.

But I'm sure more than one person saw me walking around, still in my suit from work, with my one-shoed son and thought: "typical oblivious dad." [They might actually be right because I put him down at one point to pick up this big container of litter and wondered why he was walking sort of funny.]