Monday, May 23, 2011

smoky

30 may 2011

The fourth guinea pig of my years. Half-way to Princess Shiloh-Chailin, the one I have now. Short-haired, all black, no rosettes (supposedly decorative cowlicks). Born late in 1984, and from January to June of 85, he belonged to my parents. They'd got a pair of pigs for themselves composed of male Smoky for Dad and an orange and white female called Peach Blossom for my mother. When my daughter was out for a summer visit with my parents, she returned with Smoky. Not having been present, I don't know whether Dad simply offered the pig (my father was never much into caged animals, though he was kind to them), or if the daughter wheedled to get Smoky. Whichever it was, he became ours. He was the beginning of the second continuous animal family of my life, the one in western Mass. The FIRST continuous animal family had extended from my birth until the age of 31, when the last cat of my eastern Mass life died. Then my daughter and I moved west when I was 32, and Smoky was the first member of the second continuous family that would go on until 12 March of 2008.

He was smart, he was good, and he was fun. And while he remained an only child, he was king of all he surveyed. In the spring of 1986 I got him a buddy, as I hate to see any animal living without another one of its own kind. And what did they have in the pet shop in Hadley but a nearly full-grown male, short-haired with no rosettes, and all WHITE. I loved the idea of the all black and the all white, so home the new guy came with us. I called him Snowball.

I repeat that male guinea pigs can't share a cage once they both reach sexual maturity. We had a few months when they could be snuggle-buddies, the all black and the all white, but when Snowball became a man, we had to separate them. I put their two cages side-by-side so they could still always see each other, lie down side-by-side with the glass between them. And there were supervised playtimes of freedom on the floors.

On 31 May 1988, Smoky died. It wasn't wet-tail, but I don't know what DID take him. He was three and a half years old, and at that point in time I had never had a guinea pig live longer than that. The three before Smoky had all died at almost exactly the same age.

He began a second animal family that I thought would persist for the rest of my days. On the day Smoky died in my hands, I couldn't foresee the mafia-chick or the psychotic landlady or the spiteful, lazy caseworkers of the Department of Mental hell who would one day demolish that family that Smoky had begun, and demolish me with them.


read... Spite and Malice... Stolen Stars
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Monday, May 9, 2011

julia



tuesday 10 may 2011


Julia, or Juliana, or Yuliana. Her name mutated throughout each day, depending on what I felt like calling her. She ended up being buried in my plot in the community garden. Not my usual practice, but since there were urgent bullyings going on from the landlord -- that was the alchoholic landlord that time -- I wanted Julia safely buried someplace nice before a disaster might occur. I dug up a young iris I had and buried Julia beneath it. That plot was taken away from me two years later by the wisdom of certain turners falls twitidiots who decided that since I'd been sick for three months and hadn't been able to garden, I didn't deserve to have the plot anymore, after six years. Anyway, since a zebra finch, as I've said before, only weighs about an ounce, I'm sure two years were enough time for her compounds to peacefully return to the soil and the air.

Julia was the too-late wife I'd bought for finch Zachary in 2001. By rights she ought to have lived a lot longer than two years (most of my finches did), but birds are prone to various parasites and a host of viral and bacterial infections. Back in the early 90's I found in a used bookstore a copy of Robert Stroud's Diseases of Birds (at least I think that's the title). Stroud was the famous (to certain generations) Bird Man of Alcatraz. A murderer serving a life sentence in the prison at Alcatraz. I'd heard of this man since childhood, and had always been interested in the idea of someone like a murderer wanting to study bird biology while he was in the slammer. By the time I found his long out-of-print book, I was a birdkeeper myself, and decided to buy and read it.

So many possible diseases, and so little time. I'm sure that by the 90's many of the diseases pet birds can contract have been eradicated, and I felt I could dismiss as outdated certain ailments discussed in the book. But there are enough left to give me a fright, and it did.

So which of these ailments took Julia? I don't know. But I carry the remorse for a mistake I made in her treatment that may have precipitated her death, or halted a slow recovery, or both. One important task in treating sick birds is to keep them very warm, and I'd been doing that. Julia was in a little hospital cage with a heating pad under it and a light blanket covering it, vitamins and antibiotic in the water, etc. But on the day in May on which she died, the outdoor temperature had taken a spike upwards, the apartment had got uncomfortably warm, and I was afraid there would be TOO much heat for her, just when she seemed to be making steady, if slow, headway. So before bed I turned off the heating pad, fearing to give her heatstroke, and in the morning she was dead. I know from talking to other finchkeepers, and from some reading, that it's a real crap shoot with these little birds. Some of them live five or six or seven years with not much effort on the human's part, and others die suddenly and young. The hospital techniques save some, and don't save others.

Julia was my last finch. Haven't had another one since her death. If I ever get myself moved out of this ponystall the guinea pig and I now inhabit, I want to have a pair of finches again. I love the chattering they do, and their tiny but energetic bodies. Bodies may be small, but their spirits are large and sweet and fun.


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read... Lifelines... All my stars
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(photo: enhanced detail from greeting card)

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peter II




monday 9 may 2011


This particular Peter was one I got for my daughter when she was three. He came from a farm near a friend of ours, and there were lots of young bunnies, so we wandered among the cages until kid decided which one. The bunny was still pretty small, so child got to think of it as a baby, which, of course, children like. He was short-haired, colored in grey patches and white patches.

Myself was 29 at the time, and had previously had three different rabbits, but had had them when I was quite young. I didn't KNOW much about rabbits. We went to a farmy sort of store that my dad knew about to buy a cage for the rabbit, who was going to live in the screened-in patio attached to our breezeway. The man who owned the store told us we had to watch the teeth, that rabbits' teeth keep growing and if they get too long they need to be cut. I'd never heard of this looming menace before. My first two rabbits had been killed in their hutch by weasels, both at once. And my third rabbit had lived to be seven, in a hutch beside the garage. Now I had something new to get anxiety over.

Little Peter was often brought into my daughter's room to hop around and interact with us, and for a while things went fine. Even the farm store guy had thought there would be no real trouble, since Peter had a wooden cage that he could chew on any time his teeth needed it.

His appetite dropped, his spirit dropped, and then I remembered the tooth thing. Dad and I looked at the teeth, and they did seem long, so he cut them. But Peter died anyway, on mother's day 1983, when he was less than a year old. Daughter didn't seem much bothered by the death, but I, naturally, was brought very low. When we went back to the farm store, the man said the teeth were probably cut too late, and that in the meantime Peter, in his compromised state, had contracted some rabbit bacterium or something. Even then, in 1983, you did not take rabbits to the vet in the area where I lived. There were no vets who treated them. Vets who treated guinea pigs were still fairly new. When you had a bird or a rabbit who was ailing, the places you went to for advice were farmers and breeders. And considering the experience I've had with vets vis a vis rabbits SINCE then, the farmers and breeders didn't do badly at all.

Twenty-eight years it's been, and I can still see Peter lying on a red and pink towel at the base of the willow, just shortly before he died. I wanted him to die outside, breathing the outside air and hearing the breeze and the birds around him. I was there too, sitting on the ground beside him, petting him and talking to him until there was no more Peter. And I still, twenty-eight years later, get the lump in the throat and the little sting in the chest because I didn't remember the tooth thing sooner. That whip comes out, the whip of remorse that I blew it. I'm not complaining. I believe that people should feel remorse. This is, like many of my other convictions, absolutely passe and despised in the hollow human ambience we dwell in in 2011.


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read... Stolen stars... All my stars
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