For those of you who do not have the pleasure of knowing Catherine Clambaneva, she is awesome. Essentially, she is a singing cultural ambassadress from Greece. Check her out at: www.katerinaki.com

Before I retell this tale, let me clarify the “magical” power of this particular turtle. Catherine claims her turtle was “magical” due to the fact that it was found, in a plant, on a third story patio garden. It “magically” appeared. In short, it was not related to Gamera as I had hoped. We have had some discussion about how the turtle could have gotten to the third story on its own (Catherine suggests it was dropped by a cat, I suggested it was tossed up there by some kid) but nothing has been confirmed.

Catherine kept this magical turtle in a shoe box with some grass thrown in there, and she would take it out from time to time, to play with it and possibly sing to. On one particularly generous day, Catherine decided to take her turtle down to the yard of her apartment building complex to let her turtle graze ‘en plein air’ and to soak up some of the gorgeous sunshine greece is known for.

She carefully placed him in the grass which aroused the interest of a neighbor boy who was, in fact, a great turtle aficionado.

“Is that your turtle?” (he asked)

“Yes.” (her reply)

He picked the turtle up and looked at it. One second passes.

“It’s all fucked up”. (he declares)

“WHAT?!” (total shock)

(Pointing at the head) “Look at it’s eyes. They’re all fucked up.”

“WHAT?!” (total disbelief) “That’s im..possible…”

“Your turtle is DEAD.”

On the word “DEAD” he flings the turtle up across the yard and into the sky. He flung it so far, and so fast that she could not even follow it’s trajectory. A healthy discuss throw into oblivion.

One minute she was happily out grazing her turtle and the next she was dazed, petless and humiliated, standing there clutching an old, empty shoebox.

She was so angry at that boy for whipping her turtle into the cosmos, she didnt even have a body to bury! She spent all day searching the entire neighborhood for the turtles body, but she never did find it.

Ah, goodtimes.

Pee-Wee was shorthaired, small, fearless and the best colors of calico. I used to put him in my bike basket and cruise around the ‘hood. For those of you who aren’t in the know, guinea pigs make this terrifying, shrieking sound that sounds somehow like a cross between a buzz and a whistle. Having this sonic accompaniment to my rides, without people knowing where the sound was coming from or what it was, in my mind, helped to build a mysterious allure to my personality.

Summer got hot and humid in Wisconsin. 90 degrees with 95 percent humidity sort of hot. I found Pee-Wee passed out in his cage and he would not respond to my gentle poking and prodding. I filled up the sink with cool water and slipped him into the refreshing pool. He popped up in the air, thrashing his arms and legs wildly like he was being electrocuted or fighting a great white shark. I scooped him up in a fluffy towl and patted him dry. His whole body was pounding a fast heart beat and I figured out then that he was suffering from heat stroke.

My Mom’s room was the only room in the house that had an air conditioner. I took him in there, turned the air conditioner on, making sure the control knob was set to “cold” and “high”. I layed him on top, still wrapped in his towel, and left him there to cool down.

I came back later that night and he was as rock hard like as an ice cube. I could pick his whole body up by his little rat foot, a rodent popsicle. I can’t say if he died from heatstroke or from being frozen by the air conditioner.

He would share this entertainment with the family by setting him up on the kitchen countertop (usually during dinner time food preperation) with a small hand mirror leaning against his bowl thus cleverly absolving himself of any food preperation duties. Momo would try to attack his own reflection endlessly which gleefully inspired my brother to offer up the encouraging shout: “GET YOURSELF!” 

Could Momo, the japanese fighting fish, #1: Understand conversational english and/or #2: Hear him underwater ? Doubtful.

If he did hear my brother and understand would he have thought in reply: “THANKS, MAN!! YOU KNOW I’M TRYIN’! AND I’M GONNA KEEP ON TRYIN’ FOR YOU!! I LOVE YOU MAN!!”?? Again, Doubtful.

But, I digress.

Every nine days, when the house would ‘run out’ of drinking glasses, I would make a reconnaissance mission to my brother’s room to retrieve whatever I could find. The glasses would be there, waiting to be saved, with various levels of orange juice, milk or coke still in them, pillows of mold obscuring the residual o.j.

This time, a new, most special aroma flavored the familiar landscape. Behind the drinking glasses, Momo’s bowl was wedged into a window sill. Momo was dead. Floating on top, he had bloated up to about three times his normal mass. I went to grab the bowl and observed he was actually suspended above the surface of the water by glob upon glob of milky mold, almost transparent save for the strand upon strand of fish poop.

I was shocked he was dead but couldnt honestly remember the last time I had actually seen Momo. I confronted my brother about it, annoying him. “Oh, he died,” he replied.” What do you want me to do, bring him back to life?”

Pepper

Pepper eventually died much later with her beaveresque teeth firmly clamped around one of the metal rungs of her cage. Smartly wearing my mom’s yellow dish washing gloves, handfuls of her long, black hair slowly pulled out as I tried to remove her from her cage. By mouth, she wobbily slid back down the rung of her cage in a circular direction like a possessed pole dancer.

She was like a smelly wig, mostly fur. After some struggle, I eventually used needlenose pliers to wrench her mouth open to get her off the cage.

Walter “looked” like a male, so he was. He would hang out with my guinea pig Pee-Wee (also male) to have “Guy Time” in the form of play dates and sleep overs. We had to seperate them when things turned sour and they started fighting eachother over the smallest things, leading us to form the opinion that all guinea pigs are petty, petty things.

Walter went into greatly distressed labor during one of my parents dinner parties, which in turn, greatly distressed my little sister.

After much scrambling, Walter eventually passed out, allowing my mother to give my sister the calming diagnosis that he was sleeping.

Despite a candlelight vigil, Walter’s body was rock hard by midnight. I dont think my sister ever figured out that He was a She.

She was an eater, not a hunter, and an eater of everything. Favorite edible items included colored crayons and socks which yeilded some very soft, colorful piles of poop to discover.

One afternoon, I came home from school to find Meg in the backyard struggling to pass something. After long and careful scientific observation, I picked up a stick and lanced an object that was protruding from her anus and slowly pulled. I successfully extruded a perfectly intact pair of my Mom’s ‘desert rose’ hued panty hose from her butt. You could have rinsed them out and reworn them! She was so happy, she tore around the yard all crazy like, and kept circling back to jump up on me to try to lick my mouth.

Proof of her amateur hunting abilities stem from an episode where I witnessed her in hot pursuit of a stag. Joyfully bounding through the woods with her mouth wide open, she was clothes-lined by a barbed wire fence. Ouch. She returned home with a very bloodied muzzle and did not open her mouth for 3 days.

She got to be almost 200 pounds before her death at a ripe old age. It took three of us to get her into the station wagon for my Mom to take her to the vets when it was time for her to be “put to sleep.”

His daily routine: jump the fence, roam around the neighborhood, return home. One time he returned home with an almost perfectly cooked rack of BBQ’d ribs that we assume he got off of some one’s grill. Later that month, an irrate woman called the house and screamed “YOUR DOG IS RAPING MY PUPPY!!”  at my startled mother on the phone. No-one knew he had yet jumped the fence that day. My Mom had to go collect him and tell that woman she was sorry our dog raped her puppy.

He lived a good, full life and died upstairs in my Mom’s bedroom during a thunderstorm. By the time I discovered him, rigamortis had set in. Getting him downstairs was like carrying a coffee table upside down. Our pet graveyard was in a corner of the backyard, underneath an Apple tree.

I had to dig a ridiculously large square hole to bury him. My Mom and sister attended the funeral despite the pounding rain. They were too distraught to help me get him in the hole, so they just stood there and cried while they watched me wrestle with his body, making loud yelps whenever I had to manipulate him, as if he could somehow still feel pain.

Footnote: My sister’s youngest child is named Isaac. His nickname is Ike and the family lovingly calls him “Ikey bubby” which is how my sister referred to Ike the dog, when she was his age.

When I almost accidently step on one, my naive, childish trust in the rightness of the world was shattered forever like a dirty bomb transforming all of my true feelings into a puff of radioactive dust.

The bird was a baby robin. Its beak was wider than its skull and very cartiledge like but opened and closed at a calm, mechanical rate like a heart beat. When it’s beak reached it’s full span in the open mouth position, it appeared as if the head had actually turned itself inside out. I observed this function for some time more and eventually it occured to me that this bird was in need of some food. I panicked when I began to believe that the bird might starve to death, right then and there, with me taking no action. I thought fast: “What do birds eat?” The answers bombarded me, in rapid fire: “…bugs…mites…that’s a type of bug, so I already said that…worms, yes worms are bird food…NO TIME TO DIG UP WORMS…what are worms? slimy strips of muscle?…what’s a muscle made out of…HAMBURGER!” 

I found a cardboard box in the garage and carefully transferred the baby bird into it. It peed all over me during transport. I became more frantic. The bird was still in danger of starvation. Dashing to the kitchen, I grabbed a package of hamburger out of the fridge and carefully rationed out an appropriate amount to feed the bird (which any child knows instinctively, is about the size of a golf ball).

I ran back to the starving bird, rolling the hamburger between the palms of my hands, waiting to catch that perfect open beaked moment to feed the bird. Time stood still.The moment I dropped the meat ball from my hands, so elegantly in slow motion , I had a new realization “It’s the wrong shape!! NOT ball shaped, should be A WORM SHAPE!“. It was too late. The bird ‘caught’ the meat ball right in it’s beak, kindof sputtered and died instantly.

I can’t say if the impact of the meat ball hitting the bird killed it or if it suffocated from the meat ball blocking it’s air passage. I was sorry that I accidently killed the bird, I was trying to save it. I did learn a lot about how sneaky nature is, that day.