On Saturdays we get into the car with our father and drive down to the place where he works. It is actually the Zoology Building, but we don't call it that. It is just the building. The building is enormous. Whenever we're there it's almost empty, because it's Saturday; this makes it seem even larger. It's of dark-brown weathered brick, and gives the impression of having turrets, although it has none. Ivy grows on it, leafless now in winter, covering it with skeletal veining. Inside it there are long hallways with hardwood floors, stained and worn from generations of students in slushy winter boots, but still kept polished.
In one room is a cement pool filled with thick-looking greenish water in which large turtles sit and blink or clamber ponderously up onto the rocks provided for them, hissing if we get too close. We don't find any of the things in the building repulsive. The general arrangements, though not the details, are familiar to us, though we've never seen so many mice in one place before and are awed by their numbers and stench.
Some of the upstairs rooms are labs. The labs have vast ceilings and blackboards across the front. They contain rows and rows of large dark desks, more like tables than desks, with high stools to sit on. Each desk has two lamps with green glass shades, and two microscopes, old microscopes, with heavy thin tubing and brass fittings. We've seen microscopes before, but not at such length... Sometimes we're given slides to look at... Or we pull hairs out of our heads to look at them...
It's from the building that we watch our first Santa Claus Parade. We've never seen a parade before... Santa Claus is at the end, smaller than expected. His voice and his loudspeaker jinglebells are muted by the dusty glass; he rocks back and forth behind his mechanical reindeer, looking soggy, blowing kisses to the crowd. I know he isn't the real Santa Claus, just someone dressed up like him. Still, my idea of Santa Claus has altered, has acquired a new dimension. After this it becomes hard for me to think of him without thinking also of the snakes and the turtles and the pickled eyes, and the lizards floating in their yellow jars, and of the vast, echoing, spicy, ancient and forlorn but also comforting smell of old wood, furniture polish, formaldehyde and distant mice.