The Chattering boys are out of school all week, so today I took them to New York City’s historic Central Park Zoo (I had to blog until three in the morning to earn this day off, but I’m so glad I did.) Spring is in full flower here; the portrait artists were hawking their services down the sunny path to the zoo’s entrance. Horses and buggies! Blossoms! Hot dogs! Candied peanuts! Hasidic families with fathers in fur hats and traditional garb were pushing strollers, enjoying the more relaxed pace of the days after Passover. Yuppie NYC mothers (whose average age, I’ve noticed, hovers around 48) were hot-flashing and fanning themselves in the zoo’s steamy Amazon rain forest. Lovers on lunchbreak were holding hands, gazing longingly into each other’s eyes.

Taking this in and not rushing became my practice. The boys weren’t ever the problem, it was my mind that wandered off in all directions. At the Chinstrap and Gentoo penguin exhibit, for instance, my kids were enthralled. We stood there as a threesome, watching penguins do everything penguins can–swim, dive, flap, poop, waddle, nudge, nuzzle, and cry. As we stayed on, laughing and pointing, the pushy ambitions of my chattering self kept insisting that I interrupt the boys’ obvious enjoyment of the moment and say, “Okay, that’s enough. Let’s go on,” but I stayed mindful and silent. “Wait. Wait. Wait,” I thought between breaths. “Wait for the boys to be ready to leave.” And they did finally say they were ready, but it was a good seven minutes after I would have left the comic penguin troupe had I been watching on my own.

On the rafters of the red panda house, some smart zoo designer inscribed Walt Whitman’s words from a passage of “Leaves of Grass”:

“I think I could turn and live with animals,

they are so placid and self contain’d;

I stand and look at them long and long.”