CANDID

I was a wide-eyed five year old when we adopted Oscar, a Black Lab, from the Humane Society. I don’t remember much about the events leading up to adopting him, but I remember that it took us forever to get him and five year old me could hardly even stand the excitement of a new dog. I don’t remember how long we actually owned the dog either; it is all very blurry and surreal. What I do recall from that dark time is that Oscar was a mentally unstable psychopath, but I still loved him.

 

Only a few weeks after adopting him, we found out that Oscar had “separation anxiety.” To put this into perspective, my mom would go down the driveway to get the mail, come back within two minutes, and Oscar would have either torn something apart or flung feces every which way. He was quite persistent with this actually, it happened every time we left the house. So being the geniuses that they are, my parents got this cage that seemed impossible for even Harry Houdini to break free from. 

 

One day, we went to my grandmother’s for dinner.  We were gone for maybe three hours. When we got home, my mom went upstairs to my parent’s room to let Oscar out of his cage and the moment she opened the door, her jaw struck the floor. My parents’ bedroom looked like the aftermath of Katrina. Curtains were torn down and shredded, lamps were broken, and there was poop everywhere. This was the moment that my parents decided it was time to put down Oscar (I honestly condemn them for not doing it sooner).

 

My dad has a lot of shotguns. That night he took Oscar out back and- no I am totally kidding. They actually decided to have him put down humanely at the vet’s office. My mom told me he “went to the farm”. I believed this until about maybe age seven while watching an episode of Friends.

 

Chandler: “Yeah, it’s like when you’re a kid, and your parents put your dog to sleep, and they tell you it went off to live on some farm”

 

Ross: “That’s funny because our parents actually did send our dog to live on a farm.”

 

Monica: “Uh Ross.”

 

Ross: “….Oh my God, Chi Chi!”

 

Ross’s realization was similar to mine. I slowly turned, bug eyed and lachrymose to my mother, who pressed her index finger up to her lips so I wouldn’t say anything in front of my younger brother. My younger brother is now 18 and I am pretty certain he still thinks Oscar is on a farm somewhere. 

Skip ahead to ages eleven through thirteen, I owned four hamsters and a mouse within those years. They were (in chronological order): Rebecca 1, Cocoa, Rebecca 2, Cinnamon, and Minnie the mouse. I can safely say that I will now never have a child named Rebecca; the name holds a curse apparently. Rebecca 1 was the most outstanding creature to me. She had this glass aquarium-like cage with a mesh wiring roof, a beautiful castle for her to climb and a wheel for exercise. She would climb to the top of the castle which was about an inch away from the mesh roof, reach up, grab onto it with her claws, pull herself all the way onto it and walk upside down along the wired roof. I think she was trying to escape her cage and run away from my love. I had Rebecca for about two months when I had to come up to Miami University for my championship swim meet and I was staying the whole weekend so I trusted her life in the hands of my younger brother. It was simple really, he had to refill her food, check her water and make sure her cage was locked so she wouldn’t escape.

 

We left for the meet Friday afternoon. All was well on the home front by Friday evening and I slept peacefully knowing Rebecca was okay. Saturday morning, however, all hamster hell broke loose. My mom got a call from my brother on the way to the meet. Instead of telling her what happened first, which would have been smart so she could’ve withheld the information from me, he asked for her to give the phone to me. 

 

“Hey, um, Carolyn?” he asked me.

 

“What? Yeah? What’s wrong? Is Rebecca okay?” I asked him in a hurry knowing she probably wasn’t okay at all.

 

“Uh Rebecca is really stiff and I don’t think she’s breathing.”

 

So many thoughts rushed at me in that moment. I couldn’t organize them all at once; all I could do was sob. I even contemplated jumping out of the moving car. Obviously my sobbing wasn’t going to help me swim well, nor would it have brought Rebecca back to life. My mom took the phone back from me and was talking to my brother, telling him it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t, but blaming him in my head was easier. She really just died of natural causes, maybe she committed suicide by jumping off of her castle, there is no way of knowing, I am pretty sure there aren’t hamster autopsies.  

 

The rest of the hamsters and the mouse came and went just as fast as Rebecca 1 had, their deaths were less dramatic but their lives just as short and unfulfilled. At my house in the backyard, we have a hamster cemetery which is so full that if we had to bury another animal, we might just accidentally find ourselves a little surprise. 

 

I’m going to go back in time a little to about age nine but this particular pet spanned all the way until I was fifteen years old. My older brother went on a vacation with some friends to Myrtle Beach. He came home from this trip with a tan and a pet turtle. My mom was not a happy lady but my little brother was so excited about it she couldn’t say no. We decided to name him Squirt, although this was before Finding Nemo even came out.

 

Squirt was the most boring out of all the pets but certainly the most long-lived so far. He was pretty small maybe about four inches long and had red on his face. His cage was a large glass aquarium filled up about half way with water and some decorative rocks. Since turtle are notorious for carrying Salmonella, we weren’t exactly allowed to pick him up and play with him which prevented him from hating me. Squirt didn’t really do much. He just swam around a little and his only entertaining quality is that sometimes he would eat his little turtle food pellets right out of your hand.

 

Like I said before, turtles are known for carrying Salmonella so whenever my mom had to clean his tank that was an ordeal in itself. She would have to take squirt out of his tank, put him into a separate bowl (he would lose his mind and try to climb out every single time), then she had to pour out the water from the tank into the sink and scrub the tank. Every single time she cleaned it she would also have to put a fresh layer of bleach over every surface in our kitchen just to kill all of the bacteria. Well, eventually my mom grew tired of this. It is a known thing that turtles live for a very long time so she didn’t want to have to keep doing this for years. My grandparents have a tiny pond in the garden in their backyard so my mom decided we were going to let Squirt loose into the wild. Apparently “that’s what he would have wanted” according to my mother.

 

The dreaded day arrived where Squirt was to be set free. With heavy hearts and heads hung low, my little brother and I took Squirt to my grandparent’s in a little bucket. We said our final goodbyes with tears in our eyes and gently placed him next to the pond. We sat there awhile to see what his next move would be but he remained still with his head retreated into his shell. Maybe he was trying to hide his tears as well. My brother and I left after a while to go home not sure exactly what would happen to the little guy. Even to this day when we go over there we always check to see if little Squirt is still hanging out around the pond. So far, he hasn’t been.

 

We got a dog my freshman year of high school who hates me, but I’ll get to that later. Last year while I was home for winter break, I felt I had a void in my life and decided to fill that void with a pet fish. My little brother and I went to the pet store and spent hours picking out the perfect décor, a little glass bowl and most importantly, the most magnificent Beta fish I have ever seen. I spent probably fifty dollars on all of the sundry fish-related items. If you have never seen a Beta fish, they are about two inches in length at their largest, they also vary in many colors. Hugo was a lovely blue-ish purple color and he appeared to change color when the light hit him.

 

Once we got home I Googled exactly how to raise a Beta fish and followed the instructions to a T. I put the fish in a bowl and decided to name him Hugo after Hugo Stieglitz from the movie, Inglorius Basterds (I went through a phase last year). I read somewhere that Betas can live for up to five years and I was determined to make this happen. When I went to bed that night Hugo was perky and living his fishy little life, all was well in the world.

The next morning I woke up and went downstairs to find Hugo belly up. I was obviously sad but at that point in my life, it wasn’t a huge shocker. I scooped out Hugo and gathered my family to the upstairs bathroom for a very tasteful funeral service. On my phone I pulled up a YouTube video of Amazing Grace being played on the bagpipes and my little brother brought out one of his guns for a one-gun salute. The service itself was similar to one the government would have for a president’s death, probably. 

 

Later on I figured out that I was supposed to use distilled water in a Beta fish’s bowl but instead I used tap water which in turn, essentially suffocated the little guy. Before break ended I decided I was feeling ambitious and bought another Beta before coming back school. I mean, I had spent practically my entire college fund on fish supplies; I didn’t want them to go to waste. The next Beta I bought was female and I named her Olivia. She was a lot smaller than Hugo and more of a pink color. Olivia lasted a little longer than Hugo. The problem with Olivia is that she wouldn’t eat or poop. This stressed me out a lot because all I wanted was for one pet of mine to live a great and memorable life. I, of course, Googled this problem and some sort of fish Web MD website told me she probably had this incurable disease that Beta’s can get, they can’t poop and eventually die. There is medicine that you can buy to give the fish but there aren’t any pet stores in Oxford that I am aware of. Another part of the website said that Epsom salt worked almost as well, so in a panicked state I went out to Kroger at midnight just for some stupid salt. I loved this fish so much and just wanted one of my pets to live longer than a month. I guess the Epsom salt started to work because she began eating again for the first time in days but was still really bloated. Long story short, she lived for maybe three more weeks and eventually slipped into a peaceful death. None of my friends at school understood my pain over this fish’s death; nobody attended her bathroom funeral.

 

Flash forward to today; I have had a Maltese named Sophie for about seven years now. She is so small and so cute, but if Satan were a dog, he would be Sophie. I guess it’s my own fault for her hatred towards me. She is about six pounds, extremely easy to manhandle and hold against her will but big enough to squeeze and love, unlike a hamster. She hates me and my brother but loves my parents. When I come home from being at school for months, she just scoffs at me and runs away. If my dad comes home from being at work for just a day, she absolutely loses her mind with excitement. It’s very easy to mess with her because she is so small and it’s hard to feel guilty because she is so mean. My brother and I throw her favorite bone back and forth to each other for hours but never actually let her have it. We also chase her around a lot; there are thousands of reasons for her to hate me. 

 

I guess I’m not exactly fit to be a pet owner but part of me thinks this may just run in my family. When my mom was little she had a hamster named Clyde. Clyde had gotten very sick (apparently he had suffered from a stroke which is horrible but picturing a stroked out hamster is somewhat hilarious if you’re a terrible person like me) and my grandparents grew tired of taking care of sick little Clyde. One night, they put Clyde into a brown paper bag, went out to their car, my grandma got in the driver’s seat and turned the car on. My grandpa went behind the car with the hamster bag and held it behind the exhaust pipe until poor old Clyde suffocated to death. My grandparents then took Clyde and placed him back into his cage to make it look like he had died naturally. My mother didn’t find this out until maybe four years ago. It’s not like they are sociopaths or anything but they just had to do something terrible to put the little guy out of his misery. That’s how I am. It’s not that I viciously murder and torture all of my pets but I love so much that it ends up seeming like I’m abusive.

 

It’s pretty funny that the two pets that stuck around the longest are the ones who I either couldn’t play with because of the Salmonella or who was just mean to me. All of my pets either hate me or maybe they all just died to get away. Maybe I’m a terrible pet owner, or maybe I just love them too much but I will never stop trying. Perhaps being a horrible pet owner runs in the family but I really hope that one day I can have an animal live longer than a year that loves me even though maybe I hug it a little too hard from time to time.

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