I’ve learned my lesson when it comes to animals. They love me, and I’m pretty good with them, but I will probably not get another pet for as long as I live, because they would never forgive me for it. It’s not that I abuse or kill them (ok, except for the once as you’ll see), it’s just that all my pets have ended up to be ill-fated ones.
My first pet was my brother’s and mine. It was a smallish-medium sized painted turtle we named “Bubba”. We were in West Virgina, which we used to visit for most holidays because my mother’s family is from, and is still in West Virginia. Now before you start with the cousin or sister marrying jibes, I will explain that my grandparents were actually related. They had the same last name, Mollohan, before they got married. They were actually fifth cousins if anyone is counting, but back to the story. My cousin rescued “Bubba” from under the wheels of a big yellow school bus that day, and we named him and loved him for the rest of that day we got to spend with him. That night, we had to let him go, said our tearful goodbyes, and by the next morning, sunday, there was no sign of him. We went to church, and came back to our Grandparents’ trailer. To our instant elation, there was Bubba on the cement of the back doorway! He came back, he came back! That or he’d wandered around, gotten lost, and decided to ask for directions. Either way, the next time we were headed down to visit, we were just as happy to hear that he would be there to play with us! When my dad pulled into the driveway, we all heard a sickening crunch!, and we jumped out of the car to see that, yes, Bubba had gone to that big pond in the sky. They scooped him up with a shovel and threw him in the creek, and that was his burial.
The next time I had a pet, there were two. I had a roommate named Larry for awhile, which soon turned out to be a mistake, but we decided having pet(s) would make us seem all that more appealing to the ladies. Something to do with sensitivity, or being responsible enough to take care of a living thing. We wanted something easy to take care of, and something cheap. Well, feeder mice, those little albino balls of fur, were only a buck apiece, so we bought two. It would make a grand story to tell the females about how we basically saved them from a horrible death being fed to someone’s snake or something. They were tiny when we first got them, and first we got by feeding them bread and water, maybe the occasional potato chip. One was scared and shy, and his eyes wouldn’t even fully open yet. This one we named Casper, after casper the friendly ghost. The other was his polar opposite, frisky, adventurous, outgoing, the whole shebang. This fellow we named Crackhead. (we had to get two males b/c they can tell if they are males when they are little, and you can’t be certain to get two females, and we didn’t want them breeding. Gay sex wouldn’ve been ok, whatever they wanted to do in their own home, but no breeding.) Anywho, their diet needed to be broader, because the one day we woke up to find that Casper had been killed and eaten by Crackhead. So we got him gerbil type food. He lived for quite awhile considering he was supposed to end up as snake food originally, and my little nephew Thomas (4) always begged for me to take him out and let him pet and play with Crackhead. Soon after, Thomas would talk about his Uncle Nick’s pet mouse ‘Crackhead’ wherever he went. Which was not a good deal when they try to attend church regularly. So I had to fill out the required papers, and send them in to change his name to ‘Whitey’. I just started correcting Thomas with ‘Whitey’ when he said ‘Crackhead’. I moved Whitey to the basement and sorta forgot to feed him for awhile, and he died (sorry buddy). The time came to break the news to Thomas when we were en-route to my Uncle Dude’s funeral. Oddly enough Thomas had picked up the adorable little habit of constantly dropping the word ‘dude’ into his sentences instead of saying a person’s name. So we had to explain to him that he shouldn’t say dude at the funeral, because it might make some people extra sad. The conversation changed and he was just talking to me and he brought up Whitey/Crackhead. He sometimes slipped back into calling him Crackhead, as did I. As we were on our way to the funeral of a adult person, I figured it was time to level with him. “Crackhead died,” I told him. Not missing a beat, he replied, “Did he go up to heaven to live with the Mousy Jesus?” His mom and dad and I all had to keep from laughing, no small feat with that hilarous question, and I simply told him yes, and let that be that. The End.
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