Ben and I both take biology, and the first weekend assignment we get, right after Rosh Hashanah, is to find and identify an animal native to New York City and look up its family and species and life cycle.
“What’s a species?” says Ben.
“I don’t know. What’s a life cycle?”
We both scratch our heads, and he says, “What animals do we know?”
I say, “Cat. And dogs and pigeons and squirrels.”
“That’s dull. I want to get some animal no one else knows about.”
“Hey, how about a praying mantis? I saw one once in Gramercy Park.”
Ben doesn’t even know what it is, so I tell him about this one I saw. For an insect, it looks almost like a dragon, about four or five inches long and pale green. When it flies, it looks like a baby helicopter in the sky. We go into Gramercy Park to see if we can find another, but we can’t.
Ben says, “Let’s go up to the Bronx Zoo Saturday and see what we can find.”
“Stupid, they don’t mean you to do lions and tigers. They’re not native.”