April 25, 2005

• My apologies for the melodramatic post this weekend. Something that my husband and I had been counting on and preparing for all year fell through in a way that completely blindsided us. I’m an over-zealous girl and my Achilles heel is my confidence. I let my faith in myself and others and my enthusiasm for life eliminate all doubt. Usually this works out great for me (my mamacita calls it “my sparkle.” Aww, shucks…thanks mom!), but I am starting to realize that perhaps a little doubt is healthy. That way when rejection happens (as is bound to happen sometimes to those who actively pursue the life they desire), it is not so completely out of left field. Anyhow, while I can’t get into details in my blog (this being a public forum and all), for those of you who it matters to: Scotland is a no go. But after a completely devastating weekend, Plan B’s are in motion. For those of you who are wondering what I’m talking about, give me a few months and I’ll dish.

  After sticking with me through a brief depression and food poisoning, I think you all deserve a little cheer. This essay is void of angst and brimming with happy, disgustingly cute things. Enjoy!
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  We’ll Make Great Pets
  © The Author, 2005

  It has occurred to me that our cat thinks he is the master of our apartment. And really, who am I to argue? Giles Alejandro Scimitar is here hour after hour, day after day, watching us trot in and out of his palace. We go to work so that he can lounge in the lapse of luxury, nibbling on the finest that Purina has to offer. Our kitty does not feel the least bit guilty if his expensive food is wasted in the throes of leaving a juicy, quivering hairball laying in wait on the hardwood floor beside our bed for my bare foot to meet its early morning doom. In fact, I think he secretly enjoys it. Giles is King and he answers to no one.

  Pets are such a queer idea, really. How did anyone conceive that it would be a good idea to have an animal roaming about their living space? I am tempted to argue that the trouble of an animal lurking about your quarters is worth the inconvenience (not to mention the potential injury), if only for a snuggle every now and again. But somebody had to domesticate pets. And something makes me doubt that somebody snuggled much with their bobcat or jackal before it bit their face off. Perhaps violence was the whole point—a wild animal living in your quarters was the Stone Age equivalent to my keychain Mace. But when did man’s best weapon become man’s best friend?

  One of my favorite pet stories is belongs to my partner. When he was a skinny, gap toothed, six-year-old kid with oversized glasses, his dad thought that he might be able to coach the nerdiness and inclination to comic books out of him with a good old fashioned fishing trip. They embarked on their trip in the early morning and by late afternoon, Shaun was getting crabby; they hadn’t caught a thing. Nothing was biting but the mosquitoes (I always wanted to write a hillbilly line like that!), and they were ready to pack up and head home when suddenly, Shaun’s line started wriggling and struggling against him. With the help of his dad, he reeled in his first love, and its name was Fish.

  Upon seeing his shimmering aquatic friend, everything that Shaun’s dad had told him about the point of fishing (catching fish for food or throwing them back until they get bigger) went out the window.
  “It’s my fish!” Shaun argued when his dad tried to throw it back, “And I’m keeping him!” For some ungodly reason, my in-law’s allowed Shaun to keep a four-inch rainbow trout as a pet in an un- aerated five gallon bucket of water, set on the back porch to boil in the sweltering Michigan heat.

  When Fish died, Shaun was devastated. He cried for days. He had lost a dog during a move before, but nothing compared to the loss of this swimmy little beast. His mom cut all the pictures of fish out of his coloring books, fish sticks were banned from the house, and all mentions of water, fish, or wetness were prohibited. He could barely even stand to bathe, for the water on his skin was too similar to how the scales and fins of Fish must have felt in his final days.

  Now if that’s not an example of kindred spirits, I don’t know what is.

  My first pet was Sasha Cat: a grey fur ball with shit for brains. Unlike normal cats, who feel the instinct to burry their poop, Sasha cat was fine with crapping in wide-open spaces. She had no qualms about popping a squat on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, or laying a fresh load atop the living room coffee table. Something was wrong with Sasha Cat.

  My family thought it would be a brilliant idea to get a dog when I was in fifth grade. Instead of picking a reasonable dog, like an old, worn out one on death row at the pound, they nabbed a high-strung yellow lab fresh from its mother’s womb. Jessie Jane enjoyed about two years with our family before puberty brought out her forbidden desires. Jessie Jane had the hots for my mom.

  Now, you can’t really blame Jessie; my mom is a good-looking lady. But her unquenchable thirst for my mom took on obsessive, jealous tendencies as time went on. She especially grew ornery when my little brothers (Anthony was in kindergarten at the time and Julian was in preschool) joined my mom and Jessie Jane in the garden. The final straw came when Jessie leapt from my mom’s side to pummel and nearly devour Julian as he emerged from the house to hang out with our mom. After that, there was no more Jessie.

  At some point in a child’s life, they want a pet simply because it promises to raise their level of coolness. For me, that pet was a Peach Faced, Hand-Fed Love Bird. I imagined that I could train my bird to perch on my shoulder like a pirate’s parrot, and let it snuggle up to me like in the pictures from “Peach Faced, Hand-Feb Love Birds: An Owner’s Manual.” But once I got him home, I cursed the book for never showing a picture of the bird shitting down the owners back or furiously biting the owner’s earlobe off. Aside from frequently gagging at the smell of the birdcage, I ignored my bird for the most part, so much so that my mom was constantly nagging me to take care of the swarthy thing.

  One Friday I was headed out the door to spend the weekend with my dad.
  “Did you feed your bird?” She asked. I honestly couldn’t remember, but my room seemed to be a landfill seeds, so I answered, “Yes—God! I can take care of my own friggin’ bird!”

  Imagine my horror when I returned Sunday night to find the nightmarish thing laying stiff and cold on the bottom of his cage. I recoiled, dry heaving; I had never seen a dead thing before. And then I noticed—oh shit—the bird feeder was empty. Without missing a beat, I filled my dead bird’s feed bowl to the brim with seeds and I fetched it some fresh water.

  And then I screamed.

  My brother had a similar experience where an innocent animal was sacrificed to the childhood craving for a trend-setting pet. Make that two innocent animals.

  Like me, my brother was in middle school when the trendy pet became a pressing, immediate concern. Instead of a bird, my brother simply had to own a gerbil. You’d think that my parents would have learned that a today’s desire for the perfect pet is tomorrow’s riga mortis-ed corpse, but my brother just so happened to conceive of the idea while all five of us were crammed into the family minivan driving two days straight to Colorado to visit my mom’s parents. After my parents refused his first suggestion that when we get home they buy him a gerbil, he thought of a new tactic. He refused to say anything other than, “Gerbil,” in a monotone, seething voice for the entire trip.

  “Say hello to Grandma and Grandpa, Anthony.”
  “Gerbil.”
  “How ‘bout a game of mini-golf?”
  “Gerbil.”
  “What kind of sandwich do you want?”
  “Gerbil.”

  At wits end, my parents bought him not one gerbil, but two once we got back to Michigan. And in a month, they were such second-class citizens that Anthony kept them in a fish tank in his closet for about a year.

  One day during the summer, I spotted my brother gagging and flailing out of his room.
  “What?” I asked.
  “My gerbil died.”
  “Did you feed it?”
  “Yeah! Just yesterday!”

  But when I helped him fish out the corpse of the gerbil with a pair of chopsticks (because he had bloated up to such enourmous proportions that even our biggest soup ladle couldn’t handle him), I doubted that the gerbil was a healthy, happy, alive little bugger just the day prior. His body was decomposing and liquefying into the surrounding cedar shavings. The other little Gerbil had been nibbling away at the dead one and was growing feral and crazed now that we were taking his food source away. The live one died shortly after.

  Kids should not have pets.

  However, bonding with an animal as an adult can be one of the most soothing, soul nourishing, quirky things that can happen to you. As feisty and stinky and incessantly noisy our kitty can be, he is our rancid little ball of fat fluff forevermore. He calms me when I ‘m sad and makes me laugh when I am jolly. He even has tricks! Bring out any item that is vaguely furry, be it winter hat, stuffed animal, or faux fur blanket, and he’ll mount and mate with it. He thinks it quite impressive. Giles Alejandro Scimitar is eager to meet every new person to come to our home; he’ll jump right up on you and sniff your mouth so that he not only knows you, but everything you’ve eaten that day.

  While I don’t quite understand the bond between us, I felt it from the moment I looked into his cute, round little eyes at the Anti Cruelty Society over 2 years ago.

  “Love me,” he said. And I did.

  Who is your ball of fluff?

  

  • 11:05 pm
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