UPDATED: In Which I Am a Bear On a Unicycle

When my brother turned 10, my mother's parents took him to Cooperstown, NY for the Baseball Hall of Fame.  When my sister turned 10, they took her to Hershey Park in Pennsylvania for the theme park and chocolate factory.  So when I was about to turn 10, I figured that these were my two options.  While I am a fairly avid baseball fan today, at the age of 10 I could think of few things less interesting than professional sports.  I have also never been a huge fan of chocolate, but the possibility of a theme park was too good to pass up.  Nonetheless, I ended up going to Cooperstown with my grandparents.

I don't remember an argument, but there might have been one.  The most likely scenario, I think, is that I floated the idea and upon seeing the reaction of some of my family members, I withdrew the idea of going to Hershey and settled for the Hall of Fame as a necessary alternative.

I don't remember much about the trip to Cooperstown.  I remember that Grandma had a ridiculous number of pills with her.  I remember feeling extremely awkward and realizing that I had basically nothing to say to my grandparents.  I remember nothing about the Hall of Fame… except maybe the plaque for Babe Ruth.  Most of what I remember is from the day after we went to the Hall of Fame and we went to a nearby carnival that I insisted on visiting.

I got to ride on the back of an elephant.  This was thrilling, but we only moved in a slow circle around a very small area.  But the elephant touched me with its trunk and that was one of the most exciting things that had happened to me in my first decade of life.  Somewhere in the carnival I saw a sign advertising a show with a bear on a unicycle and I demanded of my grandparents that we attend this show.  I'd definitely seen a bear on a unicycle in the cartoons, and I could only imagine that this would be the greatest thing I'd ever seen.

The reality of the bear on the unicycle, however, was mostly sad.  I remember thinking that while it was pretty amazing that this bear could ride a unicycle, it clearly shouldn't be.  A bear is not meant to ride a unicycle; nobody's actually meant to ride a unicycle, but that's a conversation for another day.  This bear was clearly unhappy.  And it just didn't belong.  I'm not an anti-zoo person, far from it, as I have many, many happy memories of going to the Central Park Zoo, so I'm not suggesting that this bear was going to be unhappy anywhere except the wild, but clearly riding around on a unicycle at an upstate New York carnival was not this bear's ideal living situation.  After a couple minutes, I told my grandparents we could leave.

It has occurred to me recently, when reflecting upon this story, that I must have strongly identified with the bear.  We were both stuck in situations in which we felt uncomfortable and out of place, and I don't just mean having to go the Baseball Hall of Fame.  This bear on a unicycle is, in many ways, a perfect representation of how I felt within the larger context of my family: freakish, marginalized, and tortured.  This is what my relationship with animals has always been for me, though: a fun-house mirror on my world that helped me understand my own anxieties and shape a greater self-narrative and sense of my place in family, school, and the larger society.  I suppose that is the point of anthropomorphizing anything, gaining a greater sense of self through fantasied comparisons, but I am especially grateful to animals for providing me with so many wonderful opportunities.

UPDATE:
I have now posted some real life pictures from this event, for your voyeuristic enjoyment.