UNDERCOVER NEW YORK: Monkey Business in Bali

Our guide in Bali was called Sumpeno (unlike the Javanese guide, who referred to himself as BangBang). Sumpeno drove a dinky car and had the habit of honking spontaneously at neighboring vehicles, attracting many imitators.

We seemingly had to visit a place called the Monkey Temple. I forget where it was. Befitting Hindu custom, its attendants looked after a huge flock of small brown monkeys, species unknown to me, which had the run of the place. (We also visited the Bat Temple.)

While I was there, a monkey stole my eyeglasses. One of the attendants went after the thief, and I got my glasses back, but not until they were covered with monkey drool. This was before I had my optical surgery. At the time, I was as blind as any resident of the Bat Temple. Without those glasses, I would have had to get someone to lead me around by the arm for the duration of the trip.

Recently, a woman someplace in the U.S. was convicted of trading her foster child for a monkey. The perp got off without jail time. Having met actual monkeys, I wonder what this woman’s motivation was. Monkeys are a lot like us. We are closely related to these critters, which rank as “hominids.” They are just as mischievous and untrustworthy as human children, except for the fact that they cannot talk back.

How would you like to be traded for a monkey? This is a kind of insult. Every so often, fostering arrangements fail to work. Parent and child prove incompatible for some reason, and/or the foster child turns out to be either a tiny malicious adult in disguise or a supernatural entity. Of course, the latter have never been proven to exist, so it’s situation A.

Kindly make your own decision regarding foster care arrangements