The Day I Realized We Aren't the Only Smart Ones by Gaetano Ragusa

The Day I Realized we aren't the only Smart Ones One frigid, April morning, I awoke to the sound of my mother and father talking quietly. I'm not a very deep sleeper. As I stared out of our 3rd floor hotel window at the parking lot full of different makes of cars, we prepared to go to the Smithsonian National Zoo. As one of our final days in D.C, we saved the best activities for last. The reason we were in Washington D.C was because my mother was there for a math teacher's convention. The year is 2009, and I was in the Fourth Grade. It was one of those days where it started out warm and sunny and turned cold and cloudy. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and so was my father. My sister was wearing jeans. While my mother attended her convention, we set out for the Zoo. The size of the Zoo amazed me. It was at least twice the size of the one here in Boston, and had twice the number of animals too. The animals there fascinated me to such a great extent that I forgot I was cold. The huge, rust-colored elephants and the majestic, amber colored lion were just the beginning. I remember that I was trying to get a picture of the lion while it was roaring, and it took me almost ten minutes to get the perfect shot. Then there was the dwarfish baby gorilla with its mother covering its ears, trying to keep out the ruckus of the room. The noise in the room was as loud as a jet whizzing down a runway, gaining speed for takeoff. The students in that room were the loudest in the world. They were running around, jumping on each other, and complaining to their teachers. There were at least five school groups, with every single kid yelling at the top of their lungs. Some of the screams I could make out were "It's so cute!" And "Mommy, can I get one?". The only quiet people in the room were the three of us. "Can you pick me up so I can see?", I asked my father. As my father picked me up to see over the crowd, I saw the baby gorilla and felt bad for it and its mother. They needed to stand up to all of this noise EVERY DAY. I was there five minutes and I was sick of the noise after the first two. It also showed me just how smart these animals were. The mother knew what to do and sacrificed its own hearing for its baby's. This amazed me. I knew that gorillas and chimpanzees were smart, but I didn't know they knew about sacrifice and were this caring. This memory sticks in my mind because it shows that some animals are just as smart as humans. Nothing else I saw that day compared to the gorillas. These memories of exotic, intelligent, and magnificent animals linger in my mind as fresh as they were the day they happened, even though they happened almost four years ago.