Christmas Rats

ObWi regular Laura Koerber mentioned that she had a story about rats in response to my last open thread and I asked her to send it so I could frontpage it. She then had second thoughts, but after reading it, I really twisted her arm. It's a lovely piece and I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did. 

One Christmas Eve, when I could not sleep, my father told me that he would show me just one present. Just one present, he said, and then off to bed.

The one present was actually two: a pair of white rats.

My first pets. We didn’t have cats or dogs. My mother was crippled from polio and didn’t want any ambulatory knee high obstacles in the house to trip over. Our only pet was a chameleon that lived in a lemon tree.

But now two rats entered my life. They were extraordinarily lucky rats: my father acquired them from the vet lab, thus saving them from a life of vivisection. Instead they came home to live with us.

My father made a roomy wire cage for them in the garage. Inside the cage was a wooden box full of old socks and worn out towels that they chewed into a big, fluffy cloud. They liked to snuggle into the cloud of fluff and disappear. Every day I changed the water in their bottle and gave them a plate of rodent kibble mixed with tidbits saved from our dinner. They loved any kind of fruit.  I wanted to name them Pixie and Dixie, but my father said we should get to know their personalities first and name them later. 

The male was a somnolent, easy-going animal and a bit of a slob. His fur was rumpled like an old suit, and he had a piece missing from one of his ears.

When we turned the rats loose in the house for recreation time, he’d seek out a sunny spot on the floor and sprawl out flat to sunbathe. My dad said he looked like road kill. I loved his kindly old man’s face and named him Charlie.

Charlie’s life was a succession of favorite places to sleep: the cloud of fluff, a sunny spot, but most of all in my arms. His warm body would melt into mine with his nose tucked neatly into the bend of my elbow and his tail draped over my arm. I loved to stroke his rumpled body from his head to his tail, lingering on his shoulder blades. If I rubbed his shoulders just the right way, he’d sigh and stretch with happiness, wiggling his little pink fingers in the air. He was my favorite rat.

The female was a rat of entirely different character. She was sleek, very white and had a tail like a pretty pick ribbon. Her little, pink, shell-like ears and bright red eyes decorated a vivid little face. She was an explorer. She quickly learned to open the kitchen cupboard doors, hide inside the couch, and climb the book cases. We were all very impressed when she learned to open drawers. Her name was Imp.

Given that we had a male rat and a female rat, the inevitable happened: baby rats. Daddy asked the vet to give Charlie a vasectomy, but Charlie came home neutered. The babies went to the vet med labs because we didn’t know what else to do with them. It was a betrayal.

White rats don’t live very long compared to the four score and ten of a human, but the year of the rats was one eighth of my eight year old existence and loomed very large in my mind. My days were full of the details of their lives: Impie catching grasshoppers in the yard, Charlie making a burrow in a couch cushion, the day Imp got lost in the basement, the day Charlie crawled into the fireplace and came out gray with ash. I had to give him a bath, which he hated.  Charlie and Impie seemed to be permanent features of my life.

But of course they weren’t. Impie died first. She got out of the cage in the garage and went exploring. My father found her poor little body crumpled up against the curb on the street. He brought her home cupped in his hands, and we buried her in the garden. Her grave was marked with a white hunk of quartz we had found somewhere.

Charlie got cancer. He came home from the vet with savage metal clamps in his side holding the incision together.  I was afraid to touch him, afraid I would hurt him. A few months later, after his fur had grown back from the first wound, he grew another lump. That was the end of Charlie. My father told me that he buried Charlie out in the garden next to Impie, but it was winter, and I remember thinking that the ground would be hard.

I don’t remember missing my pet rats. They had arrived in my life suddenly, and just as suddenly they were gone. Reality changed every day.

School started, stopped, started again with a different teacher. The sticky heat of summer cooled into fall, froze into winter, thawed into a messy wet spring, and degenerated into muggy, sticky, bug-ridden Iowa summer. I skinned my knees, ruined my clothes, ran my bike into a tree, and made friends with the horse that lived in the pasture at the end of the road. It was all just life.

My father had a wild and tangled garden in the backyard. He called it slash and burn agriculture because he just slashed the garden plots out of the grass in a circle around a big burn pile, planting things randomly and tolerating any interesting volunteers. It was a frightening garden, overwhelmingly green and fecund in a junglesque way. In the midst of all that burgeoning plant life, I was always finding things dead or nearly dead:  snakes catching toads, spiders catching bugs, robins with squirming worms in their beaks. It was nature, red in tooth and claw.

Weeding was a family project on the theory that those who ate must help raise the food. We were all out there one summer day when I found the gravestone of my Christmas rats. I pulled up a big green weed and suddenly the grave was right there.

It was a shock. Months had gone by, months full of the minor events and tragedies of an ordinary childhood. Impie and Charlie had disappeared entirely from my life and my mind. I had forgotten about their grave.

But suddenly there it was: the big white rock. I was stunned by an onslaught of unfamiliar emotions. Guilt was one, guilt that I had forgotten about my pets so easily. But also a strange wonder filled me; I was confronted by the past. For the first time I realized, really realized, the passage of time. I understood suddenly that I was moving inexorably forward through life, leaving a wake of events behind me, like a boat on a lake. I had a personal history.

And just as I had a past, I also had a future, and some day, way off in that unimaginable future, was the incomprehensible fact of my own death. All thoughts left my mind and I had one of those rare moments of pure awareness; I could feel the blood in my veins, the cells of my skin, the marrow of my bones. All of the garden sat still with me as air slipped in and out of my body, sounds passed quietly through my ears, and the bright colors of the day filled my eyes.

But moments like that pass and thoughts and memories slip into consciousness. I remember thinking that my hand, the dirty hand in my lap, was the same hand that once stroked Charlie’s rough white fur; and my eyes, the eyes that squinted in the summer heat, were the eyes that once watched Impie nimbly opening a cabinet door. It seemed like I ought to be able to touch them and see them again, but I could only remember.

Comments

[Countme-In]

Thanks for that nice story, Laura.

My youngest sister had a guinea pig when she was young. Typical little kid train of events: begging to bring it home, about a week of hovering over the cage, and then two years of utter neglect during which our mother would go to the basement and dutifully water, feed, and commiserate with the creature.

Then, he crawled into his mound of wood chips and died.

My sister wept like Picasso's Weeping Woman over the killing fields of the Spanish Civil War.

But to this day, she loves her dogs and her horse like they are her closest friends.

When my son was young, he kept a garter snake in an aquarium for several years. The snake went by the name of Herman but I called him Ouroboros, though some knew him as Nancy.

We left town for a week and the daughter of a work friend of my wife eagerly agreed to care for Herman for the duration.

We returned, my wife went to work, expecting to pick up Herman and his gear, but instead she arrived home that night and I asked where was Herman and she brought out from behind her back a neat aluminum foil package, like a baked potato.

Oh, boy.

Herman had gotten stuck in some structure we had placed in the aquarium and that was the end of him. The little girl who had looked after him was mortified and inconsolable and, after placing the foil sarcophagus in the freezer, we broke the news to our son, who took things rather philosophically, given the situation.

To his everlasting credit, he felt worse for the little girl.

We had an elaborate state funeral a few days later in the backyard.

When archaeologists dig up American civilization ten thousand years from now, they will excavate millions of ruined suburbs with dog, two cats, hamster, garter snake, and parakeet remains buried in what was once backyards (all of those swing sets too, entombed by silt) and ponder the household items (chew toys, tiny mirrors, hamster wheels, catnip containers) laid to rest in propitiation of the buried domestic emperors and queens.

The scientists will jump to conclusions for good or ill, but there will still be ignoramuses around who will say it can't be so because the world was created only six thousand years ago.

[scott]

That was absolutely beautiful, Laura. Thank you for agreeing to share it.

[Donald Johnson]

That was a wonderful story. Nothing to add--I just wanted to say that.

[hairshirthedonist]

ditto

[sapient]

Laura, thanks so much.

[WeWantPie]

That. Was. Perfect.

Thank you, Laura. This sweet tribute to your little rattie pets, so many years later, shows that it is never too late to appreciate something beautiful that changed your life.

Also: while they were alive, you loved Charlie and Impie with all your little-girl heart, and that's all that mattered to them.

[wj]

These kinds of stories always leave me with mixed reactions. On one hand, it (as noted) a really sweet story. On the other, I have no way to really relate to it.

I grew up on a farm. At one point, one of our friend's mother gushed to my mother, "Oh, it must be wonderful for your children to have so many pets!" At which my mother looked at her blankly and said, "The children don't think they have pets. They have chores." Which was quite true. Animals, any kind of animals, were simply functional parts of the ranch. We didn't get attached to them; we didn't name them (with the exception of the milk cow). (If asked, the usual response was "Dinner".)

Whatever the merits of being raised that way, it did have one major consequence: I simply cannot relate, on any kind of emotional level, to the way people see their pets. Is there anyone out there with a similar view? I have to say, I am not aware of having encountered them. But then, not being into pets is sufficiently odd in our culture that those of us who are not are well advised not to mention it.

[Laura Koerbeer]

Thank you, everyone. Especially thank you LJ.

wj, I'm not the best person to respond to you obviously.

One summer my family rented a shack on a ranch in the Judith Basin of Montana. My dad was writing a book. (A chemistry textbook). My sibs and I spent the day roaming around the hills gathering bones which we took back to the shack and painted for toys.
But what I remebmer mostly besides the bones was the dead bodies hung like trophies on teh barbed wire fence: coyotes, badgers, snakes, hawks. The rancher killed everything that wasn't a cow or a horse.

We went to his house for a big eating event in clebration of calf branding, I think. We were served what was probably a fantastic meal: everything fresh from the ranch. I thought it was utterly disgusting partly because I wasn't used to fresh food but also because i had seen the branding, all the screaming and the smell of burnt flesh.

I'm not writing this to sneer at the rancher (except the part about killing wildlife--I think he deserves to be sneered at for that). The rancher and his family raised beef and ate meat. They were right there with the animals they used and killed. They were not insulated by a grocery store.

They had cows, my family had neat packages of meat that looked nothing like a cow.

Since they weren't insulated from the death of the cow by miles and time and nice packaging I think they had to insulate in another way: by withdrawing the empathy that they would normally show to another kind of sentient being.

Vivsectionists do it too. They could be loving to their family dog and inflect emotional, mental and physical pain on a lab beagle.

I don't want to come off as claiming moral superiority here. I don't thinnk it is possible to live without injuring others. I don't alwasy consider hte feelings of other people as much as I should. And I know tha nature (or God or evolutioin) made sentient beings that seem to exist for no reaso except to live lives of terror until somethig bigger finally eats them: rabbits, for example. To me that is one of the arguments agasint the existance of God: what kind of nasty diety would design an ecology based on animals with feelings and selfawareness being hunted and eaten by other animals? Why endow a creature with consciousness if the creature just exists to be eaten by something else?

But I beiieve that the emtional welfare of all creatures that have emotions should be respected just because they have the emotions. I don't believe this as an absolute, perhaps because that would be just too inconvenient ( love my cornea transplant) but I try to do as little harm to animals as I can becuase I do believe that their feeligs are as important as mine. I don't know how to say that thier feelings aren't as important as mine without making what is really a self-serving argument.

Am I amking any sense?

[peggy]

Thank you for the story Laura, especially the realization of mortality.

wj, I share a non-pet perspective, although in my case it is the result of allergies. Even people who own cats make me sneeze. A feline twirling around my ankles fills me with fear and the desire to gently kick it away.

[Scamp Dog]

Laura,

I wouldn't say rabbits (and other prey animals) exist only for the predators. They're out there doing the things they do for themselves: "I love nibbling grass, it's yummy!" and the like. There's a chance they'll get eaten, but most die some other way.

Not that I disagree with the absence of God. :) Once you've ruled him out of the picture, you've got to figure out some other reason for all this activity on planet Earth, and the Darwinian struggle to survive and reproduce is what generated all that consciousness in all these creatures (the ones that find it useful, anyway).

[Barry]

Thank you for posting this.

[jrudkis]

Very well written. Can't wait for your book!

[hairshirthedonist]

Seriously. Or at least a number of magazine articles.

[wj]

Laura, thank you. It's not that I think my view is the only right one. Just that I sometimes feel that people who love pets have no clue that there might be an alternative, but still valid, view.

And I can relate to the problem that you had on your visit. We used to have kids from the suburbs come out to visit occasionally. They would refuse to drink milk, "because it comes from a cow." When asked were they thought the milk that they normally drank came from, they usually responded "from the store." No clue at all about where their food might come from.

I think it is entirely possible to see animals on a ranch as something to be taken care of -- to not see them as lacking feelings (or sense of pain), even though you don't see them as pets either. We never did branding, for example, since the only real purpose would be to identify your cattle when they are going to be out on a range where they were not separated from other people's cattle. If you are only using your own pastures, and your fences are in reasonable repair, the only reason I can see to do branding is . . . tradition.

As for the rancher who killed everything that wasn't a cow or a horse, I suspect that that sort of thing has dropped off a lot, as people in the business have learned more about ecology. Yes, you want to exercise some limits on predators who may prey on your livestock. (And, if you are raising crops, on animals whograxe on whatever you are raising.) But that's limits, not total eradication.

We learned the lesson when people killed off most of the wolves (and coyotes) in order to protect the lovable deer (too many people growing up on Bambi is the usual explanation). The deer bred like rabbits, overran the land, and ended up starving as a result. Not to mention eating all the vegetation that the cattle needed to eat.

Now, we know better. If the price of not trashing the ecology is that we lose an occaisonal calf to the wolves, it turns out that that's a price worth paying. Just as, we are slowly accepting, leaving hedgerows instead of plowing every possible square inch of land actually is better in the long term for your yields. Unless you are running an industrial agriculture operation and totally focused on short term profits, you care about that.

[hairshirthedonist]

Just as, we are slowly accepting, leaving hedgerows instead of plowing every possible square inch of land actually is better in the long term for your yields. Unless you are running an industrial agriculture operation and totally focused on short term profits, you care about that.

This gets my vote for the day's "Highly Extendible Lesson in Smart Capitalism." Apply liberally.

[liberal japonicus]

"If I rubbed his shoulders just the right way, he’d sigh and stretch with happiness, wiggling his little pink fingers in the air."

I cannot tell you how many times I have read that line and I still smile when I read it.

I hope I'm not overstepping or revealing too much, but Laura is in the process of taking the stories she's written and making them in a ebook thru Kindle direct. Hopefully, Kindle will fix the update problem with mac iOS soon and I hope Laura will allow me to note here when it is done.

[Laura Koerbeer]

Oh Kindle has an update problem? I was debating using wordsmash which is connected I gues to Nooks but both will get an ebook listed on Amazon.

I come late to creative writing. I have a degree in art and I have alwasy been able to draw. I could draw realistically when I was in first grade--accurate renderings of horses with prespective. I nver thought about writing although I had the habit of teling myself bedtime stories.

I started writing because from dog rescue and careproviding and aging I just noticed stories that seemed to be there waiting for someone to write them.

Oddly just as I was beginning to think of myslef as a writer,my sister, who never did any kind of art, clebrated her divorce by taking painting lessons. She had an excellennt teacher and became a painter. She's good. She's had a couple of shows in smaller galleries in Chicago. She paints daily.

My sister in law, inspired by my sister, celebrated her successful completion of chemotherapy by taking drawing lessons and she's good, too.

I'm beginning to think that the difference between a talented person and a so-called untalented person is that the "talented" one will do a lot of self teaching while the so-called untalented one needs to get lessons. In other words I think that many people have unrealized potentials.

Changing the subject: wj, I realize that there are people who take good care of their farm animals while not veiwing them as friends or family members. I pay more so tha tI can buy eggs from happy chickens and milk from happy cows, but I realize that the chickens and cows probably are not kept once no longer productive. It isn't a black/white dicotomy between people who have compassion for animals and people who don't. Actually there are a lot of pets that receive worse care than farm animals.

I just beleive that the dicotomy between people and other creatures is a false one. I think that the feelings of people should be respected and that the feelings of animals should be respected, too. So I try to live that way. I think that generally I am nicer to animals than people which is a failing of mine.
.

[Laura Koerbeer]

And I really appreciate the response from you all. Thank you especially LJ.

[Baskaborr]

Thanks for the story, it made my day.

I'm coming at this from the opposite direction. I'll try to keep this short and not too silly.
Roughly twelve years ago my wife and I drove from Florida to Texas to pick up a pair of Bengal kittens. Within half an hour the female, for reasons known only to Bast, decided I was her person. The entire rest of the drive she spent pressed against me. I named her Valentine Needletoes. In the years since, she's only become more attached. If I'm home and sitting, she's curled on the back of my chair, draping a paw or two onto my shoulder. Every few minutes she rubs her cheeks against my hair. When I come home from work she runs greet me. When I walk around our property, she follows like a dog. I sleep at night snuggled against my wife while Valentine snuggles against my back.

Just a litte less than six years ago I was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. While I was in the hospital getting a colon resection, my wife says Valentine spent the entire time sitting in my chair glaring at her. During hospital stays since, Val's behavior has always been the same. My wife says she can hear Val thinking "He left with you and you didn't bring him back. THIS IS YOUR FAULT!"

It is now twenty months since PET scans revealed that the cancer has spread to multiple sites in both my liver and lungs. At the time my oncologists agreed that the average survival with my diagnosis is less than two years. I'm doing better than any of my doctors expected and my plan is to be way the hell out on the toe of this curve, but I hear the clock ticking.

In one thing, I've been very lucky. I've had time to get my affairs in order and time to let everyone I love know how much they mean to me. With one exception that bothers me more and more as time gets shorter. I know it's silly, and that I'm anthropomorphizing way too much but someday not too far away I'm going to leave never come home again. There is no way I can tell Valentine I didn't abandon her, I didn't go willingly.

[Laura Koerbeer]

She'll know you didn't abandon her. She will know by your affect when you leave.

YOu are being very brave. I sure wish you well.

[bobbyp]

Laura,
As always, well said. Thank you.

[CJColucci]

Lovely, absolutely lovely. Even if it did make me tear up with memories of my dear, departed Buster and thoughts about the short time I'm likely to have left with Zoe, who is already as old as her breed tends to get.

And hang in there, Baskaborr. I have had the same thoughts, not about my current dog, whom I will probably outlive, but about the next ones, who, at my age, will be even money bets to outlive me.

[Yama001]

Laura's essay and Baskaborr's comment are some of the most beautiful and sad things I have ever read. Charlie's wriggling pink fingers along with Val's attachment are images that may never leave me.

Thanks folks, and great good luck to you, Baskaborr.