LETTER TO E: HOW TO BE A ZOOKEEPER ft. Saji Villoth & Axe Graves

LETTER TO E – HOW TO BE A ZOO KEEPER

Written & Composed By Saji Villoth

Narrated by Axe Graves

Dear Me,

So what would YOU do if you were given a gift, and the gift is a ZOO?

Me, my first string of thoughts would go "a Zoo?a big huge wild smelly hungry wild zoo full of big beasts and small beasties I don't now anything about a zoo Really a Zoo?a Zoo? frogs and dogs and thistles and thorns and all?"

I don't even like zoos... all those animals, each one unique... how do I know if the rhino has a toothache? Do toucans get scared when snow falls on their enclosure and covers their little world so they can't see the sun? Does a baby bonobo get its feelings hurt when another bites it and takes away its toy? Do skinks feel lonely at times? How And if any one of these zoofolks are able to tell me what they need, how do I make that happen?

I'd take a tour of the zoo. As little as I know, I know there are so many stories here, so many little things that I need to know by name, and names are powerful things, names like pangolin, gentoo, macaque, mamba... and knowing the names of things makes them knowable, and the stories that go with those names, stories about hot jungles and waterfalls in middle Africa, mist-shrouded geysers surrounded by ice and snow in high Japan, wild Mongol ponies' being groomed to gather bundles of hair to string a violin bow being played in an orchestra in Berlin... all those stories just waiting to be known.

Knowing the stories, where the zoofolk came from, helps to understand them.

And I'd get to work, taking care of my Zoo, knowing this is going to be for a long, long time. The promise of the Zoo is that there will be times of great joy like when a baby kangaroo is born, times of helplessness when a gorilla has a fever and I won't know how to deal with something THAT BIG that is SO SICK, times of sadness when my old elephant dies, times of anger when some visitor does something cruel to one of my folk, times when I'll feel lost and waaay out of my depth and would love someone to come and take the mess off my hands... but at the end of each day, I also know I will have learned something more, something deep, that's going to make be better at being a zookeeper tomorrow.