I don’t care how far away the Bronx Zoo is from where you live. Distances are navigable; airplane tickets can be bought; and when you get to New York City, you can sleep on the sofa in the apartment of your college roommate’s ex-wife’s sister. No matter how you do it, though, you must beg, borrow, or steal the means to plan a day. No, scratch that. Two days at the Bronx Zoo.

Go there for the animals. Animals are cute.

Go there for the beautiful landscaping, the winding paths, and the irony of seeing tenement windows overlooking your Monorail as it glides past the tigers, elephants, antelopes, and rhinoceroses in the Wild Asia sanctuary.

Go there to stare at the grim visaged silverback gorillas, which most people seem to like, but I thought looked like thugs I would not want to meet while walking down a down a dark alley at midnight.

Guaranteed, you will admire the graceful loping gait of giraffes, who seem to have been designed by space aliens. And you will fall in love with the giraffe babies.

Anything you might hope to encounter, you will, but you will also bump into things you never would have expected, including gorgeous peacocks who parade up and down the narrow byways of the zoo and drop in on animals in other exhibits as free as … um. Well, I guess I was going to say, as free as a bird!