Remembering Spooky

During my childhood years, when I spent summertime time in Boston with my Grandma Betty (in order to get away from my toxic home life in New York), she would reward me for good behavior with trips to various Boston-based tourist attractions and entertainment locales. Of course this included Boston’s Museum of Science.

Trust me. This was important for me. We would drive from West Roxbury to Brookline, take the Green Line MBTA from Cleveland Circle to Park Street or Government Center, then take another Green Line train to the Science Park station (just past North Station and the old Boston Garden), then it was off to the Museum of Science.

And in the 1970’s … this was what a kid could look forward to.

The Museum of Science was nothing short of a nerd-kid’s amusement park. Science, information, everything. It was both fun and educational. And Grandma Betty could sit on a chair and do her knitting, while I ran all around the museum and agreed to check in with her at least every half hour to make sure she knew I was okay.

And of course., no visit to the Museum of Science would be complete without at least one stop to see the museum’s great horned owl, Spooky.

And to say that Spooky was a long-time resident of the Museum of Science is an understatement. Spooky was brought to the Museum in 1951 as a three-day-old hatchling, and lived at the Museum until his passing in 1989. He lived nearly four decades in captivity, where’s most great horned owls only live for a decade in the wild.

Spooky would be brought out for animal displays and shows, and he showed thousands of visitors that he could spin his heard nearly 180 degrees to see any prey behind him. He would flap his arms on command, amaze the crowd, and then go back to his cage until the next show.

And every year, I would ask if Spooky was still at the museum. Even when I was in college and visited Grandma Betty on a college break, I took a quick personal trip to the Museum of Science – and yes, Spooky was still alive, even in the early 1980’s.

I don’t know why I thought of Spooky today. Maybe it was a tiny glimpse of a happy moment in my life, a time when everything seemed joyful and pleasant. Where a kid could go somewhere and be entertained by a big owl and think that was the most amazing thing in the world.

Yeah. I’m having one of those moments right now.

And I could use a moment like that today.