With few notable exceptions, the Grant family was hardly known for its association with the animal kingdom, domestic or otherwise. There were enough animals in the house as it was.
Oh, we’ve had our share of pets through the years, but few of them lasted longer than a year or two. The creature-in-question would be swamped with the onrush of the children to see their new plaything/toy/dress-up doll and logically fly into any means of escape. The ones that were able to keep up with us were all but certain to have a crossed wire in their cranial system. You’d have to be to keep up with us.
I tried to introduce exotic pets to the household. My first attempt was a garden snake that didn’t last one day. Dad tried to play a practical joke on Mom, asking where my snake was. I knew. She didn’t. She made sure I wouldn’t from then on. The second was a Texas Brown tarantula I named Harry (cause that’s what it was). I took it to school for a speech, only to have it fall from the podium onto the teacher’s desk and make the entire first row move back in their seats about three feet. It died on a Thanksgiving when it fell from my bed, broke its exoskeleton and bled to death.
In memory of my lost Harry, I was able to get one more tarantula, a male that was inbred with the need to escape and find a mate. One night after I got home from school, my sister Mel had left a hastily scrawled note on the now-empty terrarium saying ‘IT is out of the cage. Where is IT?’ Of course when Mom found out, she refused to go to bed until I had no choice but to lie and tell her I found it so she would get her rest. This was after tearfully emptying everything out of my bedroom onto the front porch. I continued the search the next two days with no success and considered him lost for good. This is the part where God played the joke on me. The sucker had been hiding in the hall closet and decided to take a leisurely stroll one night while I was out with friends. Mom didn’t talk to me for at least a month.
The first real official pet in our family, many years before, was a black and white collie mix named Bullet, and my memory of him consisted mostly of stories retold from Jackie and Kevin…which I have just shared with you in their entirety.
Two cats were able to make it into our house. The first, a black kitten named Midnight, didn’t last long as we soon discovered Mom had an allergic reaction to it. The second was a striped outdoor tabby that adopted us shortly before our move to Conway. It did not complete the trip with us. Dad tried to explain it jumped out the window on the Interstate, but we pretty much concluded there was something a little more sinister than what he let on. I suppose it could have been worse. Down the street, Kevin’s friend Rusty told us the Harrison’s dog was able to leap from his dog house over a fence with his leash still attached to the structure. Poor little Camilla found her pet hanging in the back yard when she got home from school. There was no mention of a note left behind.
For a while after our move to Conway, we actually had a purebred Siberian husky named Natasha. I suspect that her lineage was not quite true. There may have been a little badger and mole tossed in for good measure. We had more craters in our back yard than the dark side of the Moon.
Natasha wasn’t her full name (that was on a document Mom showed me only once). She was a beautiful animal, medium sized with dark hair flecked with silver tips, a white face, chest and paws and bright blue eyes. She never barked. When excited, she would start with a high-pitched whine that lowered to something that sounded like ‘ROW-row-row’.
Someone told me Tasha’s blue eyes meant she was a human in a past life. If she was, she was a reincarnated hooker who had a thing for German Shepherds, and the only one on the block that fit that description was Hans, the Johnson’s pet/mercenary and former ‘panzerkampfwagen’ across the street. In short order, Tasha became the mother of eight cute, adorable little screaming things who were all, to a pup, nocturnal. At least three nights out of the week, Mom would get me up to head to the Utility Room to amuse the darlings till they fell asleep, usually around 4 a.m. My somnambulism continues to this day.
Eventually, the pups (and Tasha) were all given to good homes with lots of acreage for them to romp and play to their heart’s content. At least that’s what Mom said. She traded them all for enough dirt to fill in the craters.
Another dog that came into our lives was a small mixed breed thing we called Lulu. She was found wandering around the street one day and eventually made her sleeping quarters near us, since we were so adept at petting. Dad eventually relented only because all of our bicycles were stolen one night (who in their right mind would want six bikes, outside of an adolescent chop-shop?).
During Lulu’s stay, one more dog entered the picture…one that would endear us more than all the others. He first entered the house crooked into Mom’s elbow, a shaking quaking thing, a nearly hairless thimbleful of a black Chihuahua with eyes that bulged out each side of his skull like a chameleon hiding in creosote. Mom placed a plate of finely-chopped hot dog on the floor beside the sofa and set him gently down. All of us gathered into a close-knit circle to watch the little thing rustle down some grub. The tiny waif looked up (at least, we THINK he looked up), emitted a long tinny growl and suddenly snapped at the closest person to him. That was the first and last time we watched him eat as a group.
Naming the tiny terror was next. I wanted to call him ‘Criquito’, which, I thought, meant ‘little cricket’ in Spanish (only to recently learn from a website ‘criquito’ had no meaning and ‘little cricket’ literally translates to ‘pequeño grillo’ which wouldn’t work for most human infants either). My siblings would have none of it, thank goodness. However the name they saddled him with only belies the inherent lack of sanity somewhere down the ancestral line…‘Taco’.
Despite the damaging sobriquet, Taco quickly wormed his way into our hearts and, on one occasion, into some long-lost record book. One cold November morning, it was discovered Taco had gotten out of the house. No idea how this was accomplished. Melanie sat on the kitchen floor and cried for her lost dog as Mom tried to make our pre-school breakfast. I went out into the back yard, where Lulu made her home under the foundation. I climbed inside and found Taco, a dirty smudge on the side of his nose, gamely treading his way out. Following closely behind was Lulu. It’s hard to tell with dog faces, but I would swear she had a smile.
Sure enough, about nine weeks or so later, Lulu gave birth to three puppies, Tom, Dick and Harry (Harry later became Harriet once we learned what to look for underneath). Two of the little darlings were mixed brown and tan and one was black with brown spots. I picked up one of the pups, who gave me a little baby lick on the tip of my nose. I picked another, who nonchalantly bit my face. I didn’t touch the third. We were all too young and overwhelmed by the arrival of the trio to think until years later exactly how their conception was accomplished. A step-ladder? What?
Additionally, we learned to our horror that Taco wasn’t satisfied with the one conquest. Many was the night we would watch late night TV sitting on the floor propped up by our arms, only to suddenly feel the grip of a pair of front paws locking into place and what can best be described as an ‘ungodly squishy thing’ making contact about an inch or two lower. With a squeal of disgust, we would quickly extricate ourselves from the floor and watch as Taco stood where he was uprooted, humping air. Apparently the absence of a warm body did not matter one iota to our little horny rat-dog.
Besides chronic masturbation, Taco was also a gourmand. Whenever dinner time was upon us, we would call out, ‘Taco, wanna eat? Wanna eat?’ He would then begin looking up, tail wagging to the point it nearly broke off of his butt. What followed was a circle around, look up, circle around and look up again. The faster we repeated the question, the faster he spun, a little mini-tornado in the den.
Unlike Lulu and the pups (Dad claimed in a tirade one day he sold them all to be raised as guard dogs), Taco made the transition to Conway with the rest of us. We, of course had to be on the lookout for our visiting new friends, lest they find themselves in Taco’s love grip.
Within a few years, though, he began to get old and the spinning was making him puke. His hair, what little there was, began falling out and sores began showing up in weird places. We would find indescribable piles of Lord-knows-what on the rug and were certain we didn’t feed that to him. We placed a footstool next to the sofa so he didn’t have to jump as high to get to us (we abandoned sitting on the floor years before).
He died on a Thanksgiving Night after trying to fitfully gnash down on some white meat turkey. It was a safe bet we all lost a part of us that night as well. He may have been tiny, but he did some amazing (and still as yet unexplained) things in his little life.
Would that we could live our own lives that way.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Animals (and other family members)
With few notable exceptions, the Grant family was hardly known for its association with the animal kingdom, domestic or otherwise. There were enough animals in the house as it was.
Oh, we’ve had our share of pets through the years, but few of them lasted longer than a year or two. The creature-in-question would be swamped with the onrush of the children to see their new plaything/toy/dress-up doll and logically fly into any means of escape. The ones that were able to keep up with us were all but certain to have a crossed wire in their cranial system. You’d have to be to keep up with us.
I tried to introduce exotic pets to the household. My first attempt was a garden snake that didn’t last one day. Dad tried to play a practical joke on Mom, asking where my snake was. I knew. She didn’t. She made sure I wouldn’t from then on. The second was a Texas Brown tarantula I named Harry (cause that’s what it was). I took it to school for a speech, only to have it fall from the podium onto the teacher’s desk and make the entire first row move back in their seats about three feet. It died on a Thanksgiving when it fell from my bed, broke its exoskeleton and bled to death.
In memory of my lost Harry, I was able to get one more tarantula, a male that was inbred with the need to escape and find a mate. One night after I got home from school, my sister Mel had left a hastily scrawled note on the now-empty terrarium saying ‘IT is out of the cage. Where is IT?’ Of course when Mom found out, she refused to go to bed until I had no choice but to lie and tell her I found it so she would get her rest. This was after tearfully emptying everything out of my bedroom onto the front porch. I continued the search the next two days with no success and considered him lost for good. This is the part where God played the joke on me. The sucker had been hiding in the hall closet and decided to take a leisurely stroll one night while I was out with friends. Mom didn’t talk to me for at least a month.
The first real official pet in our family, many years before, was a black and white collie mix named Bullet, and my memory of him consisted mostly of stories retold from Jackie and Kevin…which I have just shared with you in their entirety.
Two cats were able to make it into our house. The first, a black kitten named Midnight, didn’t last long as we soon discovered Mom had an allergic reaction to it. The second was a striped outdoor tabby that adopted us shortly before our move to Conway. It did not complete the trip with us. Dad tried to explain it jumped out the window on the Interstate, but we pretty much concluded there was something a little more sinister than what he let on. I suppose it could have been worse. Down the street, Kevin’s friend Rusty told us the Harrison’s dog was able to leap from his dog house over a fence with his leash still attached to the structure. Poor little Camilla found her pet hanging in the back yard when she got home from school. There was no mention of a note left behind.
For a while after our move to Conway, we actually had a purebred Siberian husky named Natasha. I suspect that her lineage was not quite true. There may have been a little badger and mole tossed in for good measure. We had more craters in our back yard than the dark side of the Moon.
Natasha wasn’t her full name (that was on a document Mom showed me only once). She was a beautiful animal, medium sized with dark hair flecked with silver tips, a white face, chest and paws and bright blue eyes. She never barked. When excited, she would start with a high-pitched whine that lowered to something that sounded like ‘ROW-row-row’.
Someone told me Tasha’s blue eyes meant she was a human in a past life. If she was, she was a reincarnated hooker who had a thing for German Shepherds, and the only one on the block that fit that description was Hans, the Johnson’s pet/mercenary and former ‘panzerkampfwagen’ across the street. In short order, Tasha became the mother of eight cute, adorable little screaming things who were all, to a pup, nocturnal. At least three nights out of the week, Mom would get me up to head to the Utility Room to amuse the darlings till they fell asleep, usually around 4 a.m. My somnambulism continues to this day.
Eventually, the pups (and Tasha) were all given to good homes with lots of acreage for them to romp and play to their heart’s content. At least that’s what Mom said. She traded them all for enough dirt to fill in the craters.
Another dog that came into our lives was a small mixed breed thing we called Lulu. She was found wandering around the street one day and eventually made her sleeping quarters near us, since we were so adept at petting. Dad eventually relented only because all of our bicycles were stolen one night (who in their right mind would want six bikes, outside of an adolescent chop-shop?).
During Lulu’s stay, one more dog entered the picture…one that would endear us more than all the others. He first entered the house crooked into Mom’s elbow, a shaking quaking thing, a nearly hairless thimbleful of a black Chihuahua with eyes that bulged out each side of his skull like a chameleon hiding in creosote. Mom placed a plate of finely-chopped hot dog on the floor beside the sofa and set him gently down. All of us gathered into a close-knit circle to watch the little thing rustle down some grub. The tiny waif looked up (at least, we THINK he looked up), emitted a long tinny growl and suddenly snapped at the closest person to him. That was the first and last time we watched him eat as a group.
Naming the tiny terror was next. I wanted to call him ‘Criquito’, which, I thought, meant ‘little cricket’ in Spanish (only to recently learn from a website ‘criquito’ had no meaning and ‘little cricket’ literally translates to ‘pequeño grillo’ which wouldn’t work for most human infants either). My siblings would have none of it, thank goodness. However the name they saddled him with only belies the inherent lack of sanity somewhere down the ancestral line…‘Taco’.
Despite the damaging sobriquet, Taco quickly wormed his way into our hearts and, on one occasion, into some long-lost record book. One cold November morning, it was discovered Taco had gotten out of the house. No idea how this was accomplished. Melanie sat on the kitchen floor and cried for her lost dog as Mom tried to make our pre-school breakfast. I went out into the back yard, where Lulu made her home under the foundation. I climbed inside and found Taco, a dirty smudge on the side of his nose, gamely treading his way out. Following closely behind was Lulu. It’s hard to tell with dog faces, but I would swear she had a smile.
Sure enough, about nine weeks or so later, Lulu gave birth to three puppies, Tom, Dick and Harry (Harry later became Harriet once we learned what to look for underneath). Two of the little darlings were mixed brown and tan and one was black with brown spots. I picked up one of the pups, who gave me a little baby lick on the tip of my nose. I picked another, who nonchalantly bit my face. I didn’t touch the third. We were all too young and overwhelmed by the arrival of the trio to think until years later exactly how their conception was accomplished. A step-ladder? What?
Additionally, we learned to our horror that Taco wasn’t satisfied with the one conquest. Many was the night we would watch late night TV sitting on the floor propped up by our arms, only to suddenly feel the grip of a pair of front paws locking into place and what can best be described as an ‘ungodly squishy thing’ making contact about an inch or two lower. With a squeal of disgust, we would quickly extricate ourselves from the floor and watch as Taco stood where he was uprooted, humping air. Apparently the absence of a warm body did not matter one iota to our little horny rat-dog.
Besides chronic masturbation, Taco was also a gourmand. Whenever dinner time was upon us, we would call out, ‘Taco, wanna eat? Wanna eat?’ He would then begin looking up, tail wagging to the point it nearly broke off of his butt. What followed was a circle around, look up, circle around and look up again. The faster we repeated the question, the faster he spun, a little mini-tornado in the den.
Unlike Lulu and the pups (Dad claimed in a tirade one day he sold them all to be raised as guard dogs), Taco made the transition to Conway with the rest of us. We, of course had to be on the lookout for our visiting new friends, lest they find themselves in Taco’s love grip.
Within a few years, though, he began to get old and the spinning was making him puke. His hair, what little there was, began falling out and sores began showing up in weird places. We would find indescribable piles of Lord-knows-what on the rug and were certain we didn’t feed that to him. We placed a footstool next to the sofa so he didn’t have to jump as high to get to us (we abandoned sitting on the floor years before).
He died on a Thanksgiving Night after trying to fitfully gnash down on some white meat turkey. It was a safe bet we all lost a part of us that night as well. He may have been tiny, but he did some amazing (and still as yet unexplained) things in his little life.
Would that we could live our own lives that way.
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Looking fotoblog Teuvon images
www.ttvehkalahti.blogspot.com
and yours coments thanks
Teuvo
Finland
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