The National Zoo was walking distance from where I once lived in Washington, D.C., and I’d often detour into the animal world on my way to or from the metro. The pandas were always interesting to watch, but for many years, I would visit a gorilla named Mopie. He would usually sit with his back to the glass, sometimes with an enormous hand covering one ear.
My husband, and then my children, would eventually come too, and we would talk about why Mopie was holding his hand to his ear. Was he annoyed? Were we too loud? Did he want to hear something from his past? Was the world just too much for him some days?
I hadn’t thought about Mopie for quite some time until I heard Steve Paulson’s interviews on this week’s show “Worshipping Waterfalls,” in which Jane Goodall contemplates how chimpanzees think. Maybe someday we’ll know. But for now, we can only wonder.
--Shannon