by Merav Walklet

 

            Anyone who has ever had a pet knows how much they add to life, childhood, and happiness.  It’s also kind of like a game of chance when you get a pet, they could be really sweet and cuddly or totally yonkers and evil.  In my experience, I seem to have had pets all my life with very distinct personalities, and often times very little brains.  There are too many stories to tell about all my little furry (or scaly) friends, but there are a few that stand out in particular.

           

            When I was 12, staying every other weekend at my dad’s house was kind of a joke. Brown paper bag filled with underwear; moth ball bed; not so many band aids accessible.  Why is it that some households just don’t have proper first aid equipment?  I tell you, not being able to locate Advil when you have a headache can be torturous, especially when you’re supposed to be at home.  But the drama to find Advil was the least of my excitement there.

            One lovely weekend, my stepmom came home from the store with a baby bird.  I was very excited about it, seeing as before I had been entertaining myself by drawing a giant pencil dinosaur on my closet door.  She said she had found it on the side of the road and rescued it.  Well, I decided immediately that this bird needed me in order to live, I was its savior, Merav Christ.  I quickly called my mother, who in her previous life had bred birds for Gods knows what reason, and asked her what I should do to nurse the ugly little puff of sticky feathers. 

            “Mom. Judy found a baby bird, I am its caretaker now, what should I do with it!?“        “Well….you should probably go to the store and get some baby bird formula. It needs to eat.”  I’m certain I may not have figured this out myself, since it’s not an obvious need.  I thanked my ma, and then went off to work. 

            So, as captain of the SS Honda Minivan, I directed my secondhand mate Judy Stepmother Smithy toward a bird store, where I had bought my pet birds Tweet and Chirp some years before.  Yes, you might think I was an expert on breeding birds myself (like Jane Birdall mom of mine), but In fact I was not lucky enough to be a granny to baby tweets and chirps because Tweet turned out to be gay and Chirp turned out to be a bitch.  They just weren’t compatible.  They would peck at each other and gurgle their tiny tongues around, squawking like children.  Chirp would push Tweet around, as if she owned the cage.  And Tweet refused to have babies with her since he just didn’t swing that way.  Instead, he would sit on her infertile eggs and dream big dreams, imagine what a good mother he would make someday.

            Once there, we bought the formula and a nice little squeegee bottle thing to feed the bird with.  We went back the house and, what luck!  We remember an empty bird nest had been in our backyard for some time now, so we made a nice cozy little love shack for Herb A. Lebowski (I named him), and stuck him on the floor of my room under a lamp.  He really was an ugly little squirt, all decrepit and bald and slimy.  Well, as newly claimed mother, I had the maternal obligation of loving my kid no matter how ugly he was, so, love I did!  I mixed up the formula real good and gave myself a pat on the back for being such a good humanitarian, animalarian person.  Then  I saluted my second-hand mate when she left for the airport, wishing me luck with my new parental duties.  After a brief retirement to the first mates quarters, it become night time and Herb was boring me with his pathetic suckling at the bottle and his ugly little breaths.  I needed human entertainment.

            So, off to the siblings! As on many weekend occasions, my older brother Benji and youngest sister Sophia paired up to battle against me and my other little sister Johanna  for an epic game of Stuffie War.  Benji and Sophia had the bottom floor to hide their Flag ( a bulldog stuffie), and Johanna and I had the upstairs as our territory.  The middle floor was free zone, where both teams could try to make their way to the other teams’ base, and carry around stuffies with which they were to bombard the other team.  It was a great game.  We got very enthralled in it, until for some reason Sophia decided to take a pee break in the ghetto downstairs bathroom (which had no windows) and ended up getting locked in.  Her pee break, needless to say, ended up being more like a mid afternoon trip to china.  After noticing she was taking a really long time in the dungeon, we heard her proceed to bang the door and scream and cry, thus ending the game.  Little did we know this would make her claustrophobic for the rest of her life.  Then my dad, furrow browed and determined, tried to calm her down (not really) and pry open the stuck door.  Eventually, he just used this large gluteus maximum to knock down the door and free Sophia from the perils of the toilet kingdom.  We decided not to play anymore, and headed upstairs.  I had been so distracted by the Sophia’s screams, that I forgot all about Herb, and so the first thing I saw was the door to my room, open.

            The second thing I saw was an empty nest on the floor.

            I started to scream, and its possible Sophia was probably still screaming, and my dad came up the stairs to see my screaming, before walking into the living room.  There, my cat Molly, was joyfully batting around a rodent on the floor not far from Jasper, my puppy, who was knawing on a tasty snack called Herb.  I was crying, my dad was smacking at the rat with the broom, a door was broken down on the floor downstairs, Sophia was probably still screaming, and Jasper was munch munch munchin.  After Herb had been disposed of, Jasper found his way into a bathroom trashcan that had a (clever invention) swinging little door to put trash in through, but to keep it all locked in. Jasper, smart dog that he was, was not fooled by the little door, and squeezed his head through only to get stuck and snap the top off of the garbage, running around the house like Darth Vader.  Trauma, chaos, insanity.  The house was on fire! Well not really, but it might as well have been.  Judy came home later to see my dad slumped on the couch.

            “What happened while I was gone?” She asked, concerned by his exhausted expression.

            “Everything,” he grumbled. “You name it, it happened.”  Ahhh I love animals.  Poor Herb, and poor Jasper, that must have been the least tasty snack imaginable.

 

            Another once upon a time, my sister was in 7^th grade and went to a Bar or Bat Mitzvah every weekend. At one particular rockin’ Mitzvah party, the tables were adorned with little gold fishies in plastic bags.  Of course this was very exciting until it was revealed that the fish had no purpose after their jobs at the Bar Mitzvah, and would be promptly sent down the porcelain toilet unless some wacko little 7^th graders were interested in adopting the fishies.   My sister, animal lover that she is (not), decided that it was her call to duty to rescue the fishies.   She took four, deciding she wanted to have lots of babies, and named the boys Long John Goldie, Dinkie, Bingo, and Graceland. 

            Well, within about three days Long John was long gone.  He was probably the smartest one, and realized he didn’t have much purpose in life, after the trauma of being used for a little Jewish kids satisfaction.  So he died, and we made him a lovely coffin and buried him under a lovely tree and had a lovely funeral with prayers from the Bible.  It was kind of tragic really.  But he was the only one so fortunate to get such attention.

            Obviously my sister had bitten off more than she could chew, because after about two weeks Dinkie checked out too.  He was kind of like the Ringo Starr of the Beatles, and I guess Long John was a bit of a Lennon.  But Bingo and Graceland were in no way comparable to musicians, let alone legendary ones.  Bingo lacked any sort of organ that might remotely be described as a brain.  His daily life consisted of staying still and doing that fish-pucker thing with his lips, and when I imagine him I always picture a mustache on him.  He was a mustache-type of guy.  And you know what kind of people have mustaches.

            Well, then there’s Graceland.  Simple minded, peaceful, kind Graceland.  Oh yes, Graceland had a brain indeed, it was just severely defected and therefore he was somewhat like that guy Slaw from the Goonies.  He was also extremely fat.  It could be that part of the reason his brethren didn’t have such lengthy lives is because Graceland ate all the food.  However, he also must have really enjoyed algae-infested living quarters and swimming around in his own poo, because if I had a nickel for every time my sister cleaned the fish tank I would maybe have a penny.

            We got Graceland a smaller bachelor pad to hang out in after his buddies moved out.  It was more like the classic goldfish tank, simple and classy, for a simple and classy kind of guy.  That worked out for a while until while cleaning it (shocking, I know! But I was actually cleaning it because my sister had gone off for college by now. Yes, this fish was OLD.  I’m talking 6 years at least by now.) I dropped it and it shattered.  So we moved him back into the big place, where he would spend the hours going around in eventful circles, digging the scenery and marveling at his hip castle-palace.

            Then Graceland started wigging out.  I think his fractured brain really bailed out on him, and he just lost it.  He couldn’t handle the lonely life! So naturally, Graceland got suicidal.          

            I came home from school one day casually glancing around the dining room where Graceland lived.  I looked at his tank every day I came home expecting him to be dead floating at the top, because as far as I know a year is far beyond the average lifespan of a dinky goldfish, especially one living in the conditions that Graceland was.  But six years! I was definitely expecting a normal, age-provoked death, like heart attack or peaceful naptime death.

            But no.  No Graceland in sight!  I looked all throughout his tank (which by tank I mean bowl), and he was nowhere to be seen!  At first I thought he might have gone on vacation, but then I thought maybe he had died and my mom thought I wouldn’t notice if she flushed him.  Just as I was about to flip out, I was bending over looking into the bowl and saw a single eye peering out from inside Graceland’s castle.  The eye darted back and forth, and that’s when I realized Graceland was not only WEDGED inside the castle, he had also managed to get stuck UPSIDE DOWN.  Screaming commenced, tears!  I ran to the phone and screamed at my stepdad to come immediately for an emergency situation! Luckily he was outside in the garage and came bounding into the kitchen to see my crying and pointing at the bowl.  I was sure Graceland would have a punctured spleen or some sort of internal bleeding as a result of his awkward position for who knows how many hours! My stepdad lifted the castle out of the bowl and plucked Graceland out, who flopped into his bowl and continued to bob about.  I think that traumatic event really messed him up, like how all people who survive a failed suicide have a hard time going back to life.  Maybe he wasn’t Ringo, but more like Elvis - intent on killing himself because the “good life” just wasn’t really that good.

            In fact, Graceland had such a hard time that within the week things got worse.  I caught him banging into the glass wall of the bowl, frantically attempting to shatter his skull and end his miserable life!  He also tried using the little rock in his tank as a skull-shattered, but that didn’t work.  At this point, his castle and rock had to be removed, leaving only the pathetic plastic bush which he managed to get tangled in at the surface and nearly give me a heart-attack.  We took everything out after that, including the pretty little glass stones at the bottom of the bowl.  He had an empty house, and empty life, and an empty heart.

            At some point I realized Graceland’s bowl was gone.  I didn’t want to say anything for fear of crying, because although his death should be expected after some 8 years, I wasn’t ready to come to grips with it.  When I finally did bring it up to my sister she looked at me, surprised.

            “He’s not dead,” she explained slowly, as if I were dumb or something.

            “Then where is he!? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”  I was angry because I had become his adopted mother, and why should my sister know about his fate when she was only back for the summer?

            “Mom gave him to the cleaning-lady’s daughter.  As a pet, since you know, we don’t really care about him…”  What?? How could she say that! Of course I cared about Graceland!  Once you start cleaning up after someone else’s poo, that’s when you really get close.  Think about it - parenthood!  At first I was angry, but then I realized he was probably in a better place where his owner was taking care of him and fattening him up (more, if possible), and cleaning his bowl every day!  But, that probably means he’s dead too because Graceland was used to living in hard conditions.  I think he might have thought his suicide attempt actually worked and he was finally in heaven now.

            It is sad once pets go down the toilet drain, or in Jaspers case get hit by a car, but having them to begin with is one of those experiences that never stops being funny, no matter how many times you replay it. Just like it never stops being sad that they’re dead, the good balances out the bad.