9 June 2009
When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-9)
When Bartlett left the bear for the night, she would always exit by way of the zoo’s north entrance, having received special permission from the security guard at Gate C (that being the north gate) to catch the bus that ran down Pimlico Ave to the Heights where her $750 1-BR apartment with washing machine and jacuzzi equipped bathtub was, which she was aching to get to if in fact she was working past the animal population’s retiring for the night and was required to secure permission to get past Gate C to catch the bus on Pimlico.
She never liked leaving Bartlett in the afternoon and had, on occasion, returned to the zoo to see her asleep, at which point she would resign herself to the berating of her colleagues, namely Gary Graveson, the man with the audacity to have named the bear after her when she had shown such devotion to her (the bear) upon her arrival as part of the zoo’s population. Graveson’s ancillary reasoning stood to fact — and he thanked Bartlett profusely for the connection her name solidified in his brain — but that he was naming this young pup polar bear after Hollywood legend Bart the Bear, and wasn’t this one much smaller, a “Bartlett”? Nevermind Bartlett the Bear was not a Kodiak bear from the forests of Alaska, it was all awash in the end to Graveson for the befuddled look he could arouse from staff with questions like “has Bartlett received her shots yet?” or “do you think Bartlett’s tendency to shit with children watching is a disturbing reflection of some kind of personality disorder?” The staff adjusted to these juvenile antics and even adopted a few of their own, all of which pushed the two Bartletts ever closer and served to undermine the depth of their relationship to which others at the zoo: workers, animals, guests or otherwise, could not be expected fully to realize and/or understand.
