Post by LadyViper on Dec 13, 2007 15:55:13 GMT -6
Cute essay about turtles.
Shells of Our Affection
By Judith Warner
The New York Times
Tags: pet turtles
On Tuesday, I had an enormous amount of work to do. Instead, I spent the morning reading about shell rot and salmonella, and the afternoon chatting with a parrot.
This was not — just — procrastination. It was the day of the first night of Hanukkah. And I had decided, with great secrecy, excitement and anxiety, to steal Santa’s thunder (we celebrate both holidays) and buy Emilie a turtle.
I’d been saying no to the turtle for the better part of six months. We have a dog – another product of my caving in to family pressure – and I thought that was enough. But a turtle was, Emilie said, the only thing she wanted. More than an iPod. More than an American Girl doll. More than a karaoke set blaring the world’s most horrendous music.
There was something so pure about this, so touching and un-materialistic, so childhood-as- we-want-it- to-be, that I secretly relented. I called a marine biologist friend and got the name of the best tropical pet store in the area.
It was out in the suburbs, a tiny, old-fashioned storefront on a street of gas stations. It was dark and damp inside, with fish tanks everywhere and an enormous cat sprawled lazily on the floor. Waiting to be served, I communed with a crowd of leopard geckos. They smiled, peacefully and pleasantly, back at me.
I was startled out of our shared reverie by a woman’s voice way too close to my right ear.
I jumped, and turned to see a giant parrot with its face inches away from me. She looked at me challengingly.
“Hello,” she said again.
“Hello,” I answered.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” I answered.
This went on for about ten minutes. I didn’t know if it was rude to walk away from a bird while it was still talking to you. Finally, the parrot gave me the vague look people get at thingytail parties when they’ve exhausted their interest in you and are seized with a sudden desire for a new drink. She fell silent, and I quickly made my excuses.
The turtles were far in the back. They were swimming frantically, begging for food, and occasionally biting one another on the leg. I picked the smallest one, hoping it wouldn’t grow to a size requiring us to build a new wing on the house. The shop owner assembled for me all the turtle’s things: a multi-gallon tank, a water filter, electric heater, climbing area, green plant, gravel, food and a clamp-on lamp.
I was surprised. My own childhood pet turtle, Rocky, had started life in a plastic lagoon with a fake palm tree in the middle. That’s not the way it’s done anymore, the store owner told me with a laugh. In fact, I read online this week, those accommodations subject turtles to such terrible “stress” that they can actually die of it.
Poor Rocky. She graduated from her lagoon to a series of small tanks, then spent the final ten years of her life all but unable to turn around in an odd sort of box that my father constructed for her in a kitty litter bin. It had in it a square plastic container filled with water. There were rocks for “climbing” and next to them a platform for “sunning.” Surrounding it all were four tall walls of Plexiglass to keep her from getting out and away.
My father loved that contraption. It was a real point of pride. “She has everything,” he’d say, coming into my room at night to check on her and tenderly turning on the lamp that he had rigged up alongside the platform where she spent long days lying immobile. He loved her. He held her on his chest as he lay in bed at night watching TV. He channeled her – writing letters to me at summer camp in her voice, his hard-to-read cursive spilling joyfully from page after page of his thick, crackling, professional stationery.
He loved Rocky all through my childhood. She made him happy, even through my adolescence, when little else did. When she died, he took her to the site of the sleepaway camp in the mountains where he’d escaped in the summer along with other gleefully transplanted Lower East Side kids. He buried her there.
My mother may have said a prayer. A Kaddish, perhaps, or, more likely, the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there. Why I wasn’t there I no longer remember. The detail hardly matters. I didn’t want to be there. When I got the call that Rocky had died I was in my office 16 blocks north of my childhood home and I felt very far away.
I had flown the coop. I was 23, and getting married. Rocky was 19.
Emilie screamed with joy at the sight of her turtle. She all but wept, jumping up and down. She named the turtle Lilly. She kissed its non-existent lips. “You have a friend here,” she said, showing Lilly to their room, where a paper turtle waited on the wall. She gave her a seashell. She tried to stay up with her all night. “You are my baby sister,” she whispered, “I love you.”
The dog climbed into my lap, disconsolate.
The sad thing about turtles is that they often outlive their owners’ love for them. That’s partly why – unlike 38 years ago, when my mother bought me my tiny red-eared slider in the pet department at Gimbels – they’re now considered difficult pets. Responsible vendors warn of the size they grow to be, of the space they require, of the special challenges they pose to children who are likely to eventually tire of a one-sided love affair with their pet.
I cannot think about that Plexiglass box now without regret. I regret the whole sorry thing. My father is dead now, so I can’t discuss it with him, as I think, at this point, I might have tried.
But I do believe in second chances.
Shells of Our Affection
By Judith Warner
The New York Times
Tags: pet turtles
On Tuesday, I had an enormous amount of work to do. Instead, I spent the morning reading about shell rot and salmonella, and the afternoon chatting with a parrot.
This was not — just — procrastination. It was the day of the first night of Hanukkah. And I had decided, with great secrecy, excitement and anxiety, to steal Santa’s thunder (we celebrate both holidays) and buy Emilie a turtle.
I’d been saying no to the turtle for the better part of six months. We have a dog – another product of my caving in to family pressure – and I thought that was enough. But a turtle was, Emilie said, the only thing she wanted. More than an iPod. More than an American Girl doll. More than a karaoke set blaring the world’s most horrendous music.
There was something so pure about this, so touching and un-materialistic, so childhood-as- we-want-it- to-be, that I secretly relented. I called a marine biologist friend and got the name of the best tropical pet store in the area.
It was out in the suburbs, a tiny, old-fashioned storefront on a street of gas stations. It was dark and damp inside, with fish tanks everywhere and an enormous cat sprawled lazily on the floor. Waiting to be served, I communed with a crowd of leopard geckos. They smiled, peacefully and pleasantly, back at me.
I was startled out of our shared reverie by a woman’s voice way too close to my right ear.
I jumped, and turned to see a giant parrot with its face inches away from me. She looked at me challengingly.
“Hello,” she said again.
“Hello,” I answered.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” I answered.
This went on for about ten minutes. I didn’t know if it was rude to walk away from a bird while it was still talking to you. Finally, the parrot gave me the vague look people get at thingytail parties when they’ve exhausted their interest in you and are seized with a sudden desire for a new drink. She fell silent, and I quickly made my excuses.
The turtles were far in the back. They were swimming frantically, begging for food, and occasionally biting one another on the leg. I picked the smallest one, hoping it wouldn’t grow to a size requiring us to build a new wing on the house. The shop owner assembled for me all the turtle’s things: a multi-gallon tank, a water filter, electric heater, climbing area, green plant, gravel, food and a clamp-on lamp.
I was surprised. My own childhood pet turtle, Rocky, had started life in a plastic lagoon with a fake palm tree in the middle. That’s not the way it’s done anymore, the store owner told me with a laugh. In fact, I read online this week, those accommodations subject turtles to such terrible “stress” that they can actually die of it.
Poor Rocky. She graduated from her lagoon to a series of small tanks, then spent the final ten years of her life all but unable to turn around in an odd sort of box that my father constructed for her in a kitty litter bin. It had in it a square plastic container filled with water. There were rocks for “climbing” and next to them a platform for “sunning.” Surrounding it all were four tall walls of Plexiglass to keep her from getting out and away.
My father loved that contraption. It was a real point of pride. “She has everything,” he’d say, coming into my room at night to check on her and tenderly turning on the lamp that he had rigged up alongside the platform where she spent long days lying immobile. He loved her. He held her on his chest as he lay in bed at night watching TV. He channeled her – writing letters to me at summer camp in her voice, his hard-to-read cursive spilling joyfully from page after page of his thick, crackling, professional stationery.
He loved Rocky all through my childhood. She made him happy, even through my adolescence, when little else did. When she died, he took her to the site of the sleepaway camp in the mountains where he’d escaped in the summer along with other gleefully transplanted Lower East Side kids. He buried her there.
My mother may have said a prayer. A Kaddish, perhaps, or, more likely, the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there. Why I wasn’t there I no longer remember. The detail hardly matters. I didn’t want to be there. When I got the call that Rocky had died I was in my office 16 blocks north of my childhood home and I felt very far away.
I had flown the coop. I was 23, and getting married. Rocky was 19.
Emilie screamed with joy at the sight of her turtle. She all but wept, jumping up and down. She named the turtle Lilly. She kissed its non-existent lips. “You have a friend here,” she said, showing Lilly to their room, where a paper turtle waited on the wall. She gave her a seashell. She tried to stay up with her all night. “You are my baby sister,” she whispered, “I love you.”
The dog climbed into my lap, disconsolate.
The sad thing about turtles is that they often outlive their owners’ love for them. That’s partly why – unlike 38 years ago, when my mother bought me my tiny red-eared slider in the pet department at Gimbels – they’re now considered difficult pets. Responsible vendors warn of the size they grow to be, of the space they require, of the special challenges they pose to children who are likely to eventually tire of a one-sided love affair with their pet.
I cannot think about that Plexiglass box now without regret. I regret the whole sorry thing. My father is dead now, so I can’t discuss it with him, as I think, at this point, I might have tried.
But I do believe in second chances.