Thursday 18 August 2011

Red remembers the orangutan .

When I was about 17 Anki, my sister,Brigette and I went to there zoo to have a picnic and draw the animals. It was a bit of a drizzly day, Anki wore a bright yellow coat and I wore a beret and a crocheted cardigan.

(I loved that cardigan but I lost it on the bus on one of our outings.)
At one stage we stopped to draw the orangutans. The enclosure was quite new at the time and I sat on the ledge against the glass barrier. One of the orangutans came up to the glass and started to make eyes at me. He gently put his hand up to the glass where I had put mine and started to make what looked like kissing gestures with his lips. When the other girls sat down in front of the glass he got quite upset, banging on the glass, but when I sat down he began to rest against the glass again looking into my eyes and making the kissing gestures again.
My sister particularly thought it was very funny that the orangutan would fall in love from me, she thought it was because I looked orangutan like with my copper red hair. So she hatched a plan and the following valentines day I received a valentine -from the orangutan!!!! She put a photo of him in a card and typed a message (actually on an ye olde type writer) as if it were from him complete with spelling complaining that it was hard to type with big fingers.
PS. That year I got 3 Valentine cards in my locker. I never found out who the others were from but one had a picture of a gorilla on it and the other was a chimp!

2 comments:

2paw said...

You look ever so arty!! Anki has an excellent sense of humour!! She obviously got the chimp and gorilla on board with the orangutan!!

fifi said...

What a little stunner! No wonder it fell in love with you!!!