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Animals

      The kids were always asking for a dog. I always said no. Actually, what I said was if we had a rabbit, a rat, or some other small animal and they could teach it a trick and they took care of it every day, then we could get a dog. That never happened. The children accused me of not liking animals.

      I had a friend who had a rabbit trained to perform tricks. Another friend had a cat who she trained to act like a dog and do dog tricks.

        While this isn't my story, this is my favorite animal story.

                    Please enjoy these stories of animals and me.

                                                Ducks

       In 2024 Sarah and I were on a road trip in New England. 

      One evening we were walking down Main St in a town in Maine, looking mainly for a place to eat. I heard a duck quack. We use duck quacks for each other's ringtones. But Sarah was walking next to me. The quack tone is great because I can hear it when the car windows are open or walking on the street or when there is noise, but there is another reason I like the quack. 

      We got to the end of the block and were walking back, and again the quacks of ducks. I spied that there was a woman with her two young kids sitting at a table eating pizza, with two ducks in a stroller. We had to stop and take a look. We talked a bit about the pleasures of ducks, and I told her this story.

      When I was five or six, my grandmother gave me a duckling for Easter. It was very young, and immediately fell in love with me. Or, you could say it imprinted upon me. It followed me everywhere, it cried when I was gone. I loved that duck and carried it around with me. It went to bed with me and slept next to me in a towel.  Still without glasses, to watch TV meant sitting right up next to the screen. My little duck, who was named Patawack, would sit in my lap as happy as can be and watch television with me.

     A couple of months went by, we were watching TV, and Patawack got up and walked around and produced a good example of why keeping a duck inside the house is not a good idea. My mom didn't see the glob of shit, she stepped in it and slipped and fell. She got up and started hitting me and the duck and tried to pick up the bird. The duck got upset and hid under the TV, and behind the couch, and when I tried to pick her up she started biting me because she was afraid.  My mom announced the duck was never coming inside again, and that after catching it outside to its cage it had to go.

      Things calmed down, and she went out into her cage. She was crying. I was crying. After my parents went to sleep, back she came in to sleep next to me.

    A few days later, when I got home from school, my mother told me that someone had stolen the duck.

     8 years later, at a large park with friends that is only a few blocks from Kern and Eagle Street where we lived when I was six, sitting on the grass. Down by the water we saw a proud mother duck walking along followed by a line of little ducklings. The girls in the group all cooed at the sight. I told everyone about my duck when I was a kid. The mama duck turned and looked at me, and looked at me again, and then started running at me in kind of attack mode. When she got to me, she stopped and looked me straight in the eye. By then all the ducklings had caught up with her. 

      She hopped in my lap and nestled in. Then the ducklings all started jumping and crawling all over me. It was very strange. My friends were amazed. I was so happy. Before too long, Patawack got out of my lap and counted her chicks, and walked off.

        The woman with the ducks in a stroller was delighted with this story, and we talked about how ducks get older, and she said she could tell that her ducks were getting ready to leave. Sarah and I told her it wasn't just ducks, there is the sorrow of the human empty nest as well. 

       We said goodbye and walked off, still looking for a place for dinner. We found a Thai restaurant that had, as the special of the day, duck.

        When we lived with my grandmother when I was 8 and 9, she had a duck who laid large eggs we would eat most every morning. The duck would only allow me to collect the eggs.

     During the pandemic, Lily got herself a duckling. And it followed her around, and cried when she wasn't there. Sarah and I were in Yosemite when Lily called and said the duckling had just fallen over dead. We went into an odd state of heavy grief and mourning.

                                                 Other Birds

       When I was 9, in Guaymas, Mexico, I made a friend and we made friends with fishermen who showed us how we could feed buckets of fish guts directly into the pouches of pelicans. See that story here

     My grandmother Leonor always had animals around her. For a while she had the most obnoxious Pekingese. She gave me chickens, ducks and cats to take care of. She often had birds. There were parakeets, canaries, and budgies. She had a couple of parrots that didn't work out, and a cockatoo, which really didn't work out. It takes a certain kind of person to have those birds, and it takes certain birds to get along with certain people.

      When I was 7, my grandmother gave me two dozen chickies for Easter.  I really took care of them and most of them survived. Until my eighth birthday, when...  see this sad story here.         

      Here's another story to accompany the chicken story.  My grandmother and I went to Bakersfield on the Greyhound. We stayed at least two weeks. My uncle took us kids down to the Kern River to frolic. A dog adopted us. My uncle didn't want to take it home with us. It was a painful goodbye which still makes me sad. 

       My cousins and I brought home a plastic bag full of tadpoles. I brought a big mayonnaise jar full of pollywogs on the Greyhound bus back to L A.  My dad made me a chicken coop from an old table where the table top had started separating. The polliwogs went into a wide fishbowl on top of the chicken coop, and I watched them change into frogs. I put a rock in the fishbowl, so as they matured they could climb up on the rock. But every morning they would be gone. I hoped that they were hiding out in the backyard. Finally, the last pollywog turned into a frog, and I watched him crawl up on rock and exercise his lungs. Then he jumped out of the bowl, went through the tabletop, down into the chickens, where they ate him.

       At that same time at my grandma's house, our next door neighbor was a guy in his 20s who would be labeled autistic today. He kept pigeons in a big coop behind his house. When he saw what happened with me and the drama of the chickens, he called me to the fence and asked me if I wanted to help him with his pigeons. He showed me a nest with two eggs and a couple of days later he called me over and I got to see the chicks hatch.         

        You've heard the meme that you never see baby pigeons? I got to raise them from hatchlings. Every day I would go over and muck out the coop, and put out the feed and give them their water. 

        Joy.

        I learned at the Audubon Society that there is a flock of swifts on their way somewhere else that show up every year downtown. They fly down into an abandoned factory tower by the hundreds of thousands to nest overnight. Predator birds fly among them or wait at the entrance of the chimney to snatch them and eat them. At the top of a parking lot next door you can get a perfect view of the drama.   One of the most amazing things I've ever seen. 

          My uncle Lalo and my cousins had a tidy little house on 5 acres of land in Fontana. In front of their house stood a row of about five very tall eucalyptus trees. My cousin Freddy and I were hanging out under the trees and we heard something plop. It was a baby bird, not quite a hatchling. But the fall had broken his wing, and he looked pretty beat up. We made a splint for his little wing out of a piece of popsicle stick and string. We fed it worms and little pieces of hotdog and baloney. I was there visiting that week, and when I came back the next weekend, the bird was very happy to see me. As the months went on, this tiny bird grew to be a hawk, about a foot and a half tall. It learned to fly and to bring us lizards from the field. It had grown into a beautiful bird.

       Later, when we went to visit, Freddy told me that the redneck white kids next-door had killed our bird with sticks. 

 XXXXXXX    Sarah and I were in Bryce Canyon looking at the view, and a large friendly raven tried to get close and slowly inched its way towards Sarah. They had a moment. It was spooky, it was funny, I thought it was wonderful. 

                                    Dogs

        Before my brother was born, my dad had a pair of Dobermann Pinschers. They had puppies. My first couple of years of life was spent in the company of Dobermanns. I distinctly remember how muscular they were. And their beautiful smell. No dog smelled as good. And the color and texture of the corner of their mouths. And napping with them.

      My friend Ruben and I had some Filipino friends that were always talking about how good dog meat tastes. So we found a big dog that had had puppies. We all raised one to be eaten for dinner.

       No, I couldn't do it. 

     We named him Foogie. He wasn't very bright, but he was lovable. He often  gave that tilted head confused look. I call that state of confusion being Foogie. 

       Ruben had a dog who I taught to drink beer from the bottle.

       Max has a dog, but maybe not anymore when you read this. Duke reminds me very much of a dog I used to have. But by the time I knew Max's dog, I had become allergic to dogs. So I couldn't play with him very much. But I snuck him food all the time. And he knew he could count on me and we had a nice friendship. As I'm writing this, Duke is nearing the end. Sneaking him food is off because he's not allowed to eat anything other than approved foods. He gives me the look that I have betrayed him. 

       While at my grandmother's house, I was given a dog named Mickey. She was smart and a lot of fun. I watched her give birth to puppies. My grandmother gave away all but one, the runt, who I named Mootsie. He was lovable.

       One time when Sarah and I took the kids to the zoo we saw a little walkway that went to an area where you could see the tigers in their den as opposed to out in the public area. There was an enormous Bengal tiger. He was pacing back-and-forth in front of a plate glass window. He looked with hunger at the kids, but he looked at us with hate. I felt that adrenaline fear, the I-need-to-run terror. 

     When Thea was 2 and a half or so, the two of us went out to see the California poppies in Palmdale. Driving along the back roads, we passed a little farm where there was a big bison. I stopped, and carried Thea up to get a closer look at it. It was much larger than it first appeared. The buffalo's eye was at my eye level. The head was enormous. The top of the hump would have been beyond my reach. We petted it, and it nuzzled gently against the fence, and the fence bulged towards us, but I didn't feel afraid. 

Thea talked about that buffalo for a year.

       When Frannie graduated from Oberlin, Sarah, Max, Lily and I drove out to Ohio. After the graduation Sarah and the kids flew home. Frannie and I packed up the car and brought her stuff back to Los Angeles. We did something I saw on the maps and always wanted to do. We drove to Missoula, Montana, turned left and came due south to Los Angeles.

       On the road Frannie and I saw some amazing things. We saw the colors of the Dakota badlands on one of the few days of the year it rained. We saw an almost tornado. We saw an astonishing canyon that I have failed to find on road trips with Sarah. We saw Deadwood. Mt. Rushmore. We saw Yellowstone.

       We were in the Taurus station wagon. On top was a soft luggage carrier. Can you see the shape? Can you see the silhouette? Frannie was driving out of Yellowstone and we came to the end of a long line of cars. Maybe there had been an accident, but it was dusk and the view up ahead wasn't clear. When we got to the front of the line we found a herd of bison on both sides of the road. Frannie eased slowly through the herd. The bison were big enough that their eyes were slightly above the windows of the car.  They were milling around, but the buffalo saw something in the silhouette of our car and turned and started walking along with us. Frannie said, What should I do,      Just keep going ahead slowly.

       The bison kept walking along with us, Frannie speeds up a little bit, and the animals begin to trot. The sound was amazing. I don't know how many there were, but the force of that tonnage, hitting the ground next to us, running alongside our car, is unforgettable.

      When Thea was 5, Marineland of the Pacific, a wonderful aquarium and showplace, was forced to close. We went there on the last weekend. We cuddled with a couple of dolphin. We got splashed by whales.

      One tank had a big walrus swimming about. Thea was enchanted. She sat on the wide rim of the tank. The attendant asked if Thea was scared easily. No, says I. She gave me a fish that I was to hide behind Thea. She asked if I could whistle. Yes, says I.  She said to slap the inside of the tank, wait for the walrus to say hello, and then whistle, then wait to see what happens, and then reward him with the fish. Easy instructions. So I slapped the side of a tank, and the water erupts, and this enormous head of a walrus comes out and is only inches away from us. We both reached out and touched it. I thought the whiskers would be soft, but the whiskers felt like uncooked spaghetti. I whistled. The walrus takes in a deep breath and whistles, a very low tone that rattled my bones, and sprayed the two of us with spit and water. It was thrilling. Delightful. He got his fish. He goes away. Thea says, Let's do it again! I look at the handler, she says, Give it a couple of minutes. After a couple of minutes, she brought me another fish, and we did it again, and it was more than delightful. 

                                          Milking a Cow

      As a kid I tried to spend as many school holidays as possible with relatives. There was my tio Lalo in Fontana. My tia Josie in Juarez. And there was Bakersfield with my cousins and tia Mary and tio Carlos. 

      Decades later, my aunt Mary told me she loved it when I was there because her kids were too well-behaved, and I was mischievous.

       For most of my life I only slept 4 to 6 hours a night. At Bakersfield there was a cow that needed feeding and milking at 5:00 am. Since I got up before everyone else anyway, it was a perfect job for me. 

      The animal and I got along. After feeding and milking the cow, I brought the milk in the house, and usually my aunt would be there in the kitchen. It would just be the two of us. And we would talk. She was my mother. 

   Milking the cow and time with my aunt, is a most cherished memory. 

Migration

       When I got my drivers license I was drafted to drive my mom, my grandmother, and tia Josie and tio Marcos when they were in town.

       One time my grandmother wanted to go to El Paso to visit family and visit her cousins in Chihuahua.

       She had a big Buick which was a pleasure to drive. In my early 20s I had learned to meditate and was able to do it while driving. Driving the 12 hours to Juarez with no overnight stop was easy. It may have taken even longer than that because the interstates weren't finished. And maybe even longer because my grandma kept checking to see if I was awake.

      The visit wasn't memorable, at least for me. Meeting a lot of relatives I had never even heard of. But my grandmother was very happy.

        Driving back from Chihuahua it seemed my eyes were getting tired. The road was undulating. The desert around the road did not seem right. I was driving fast trying to outrun a big storm that was coming from the east.

        The weather to the north and to the west was clear, not a cloud in the sky. But the weather behind me to the south and to the east was a black angry lightning storm. I decided to drive as fast as I could to avoid the unpleasantness. But the road was looking strange at 100 miles an hour.  

       Wanting to get a better look, I slowed down to about 40. My aunt and my grandmother were in the backseat asleep. At about 30 miles an hour the sound was like we were driving through water, even though there was no rain. Slowing down even further, I could see that it wasn't water at all, but we were driving over and through a multitude of tarantulas.

       Slowing down woke up my grandmother and my aunt, they looked out the window, and both went hysterical. We were going about 20 miles an hour. The spiders were all going the same direction, they may have been running from the coming rain.

      The noise inside the car got very loud, so I thought it a good idea to take it back up to 100 miles an hour and escape the storm and the hysteria. And the tarantulas. 

      My aunt told this story for years.

     My tia Josie kept a live Egyptian scarab decorated with diamonds in a shoe box. When I was staying with them, my job was to keep him alive with water, bits of vegetables, and bugs once in a while. 

      Over the years our house has been visited by an occasional rat. We bought a Have a Heart trap, so we wouldn't have to kill the darlings. Usually.   One time Sarah and Lily took a trapped rat down to the park where they could let it go to enjoy freedom. But instead of running away it ran under the car. When they backed up to drive away they ran over the rat. But not completely. They had to run over it again to complete the job.

       Another time we caught a rat, Noah and Lily took the video camera and the rat down to the park to document its release to a happy life. They let the rat out of the cage. It ran up onto a tree. A hawk swooped down and took the rat away. All on tape.

       Then there was another rat. It appeared a bit odd. Looked it up and found it was a new variation on the old rat, they're calling it a domestic rat. It doesn't fully develop. They are usually solitary, and they are not especially destructive. This rat would quietly sit and look at us watching television. It was very smart and it resisted getting caught in the live trap, but we weren't really trying hard to catch it. One night however, it stole a resting steak off the cutting board. Now, welcome was overstayed. We were forced to use the death trap. It was a large rat with a beautiful pelt.

      We have been visited by raccoons. Curious, some intrusive, some destructive. They made holes in the roof and in the siding of our 120 year old house. One night we heard commotion upstairs on the deck. I turned on the light, and there were two raccoon couples making baby raccoons. The farther couple weren't bothered by the light. But the closer, more mature female was insulted, pushed her date off, walked up to the sliding glass door, stood up and used her miniature hands to block the light and peer into the house to see who had the nerve to disturb her pleasure.  That was me. She rapped on the glass. I was scared. I turned off the light.

      Over the years, we had a couple of lab rats and a couple of bunnies. They were well cared for, but became old. Once they were old and sick the kids didn't pay much attention to them. I became closer to them. One of the rats developed a tumor that was causing him pain. I took him to the pound, and they were offended that I would bring in a rat. They directed me to an older facility with older more compassionate people. That trip to the second place got a bit more emotional for me, because the rat got out of his box and cuddled into the crook of my arm as I drove him to his death.

See a wonderful story of Lily and a bunny here

       At a zoo in Colorado Springs when I was a kid, there were giraffes that you could hand feed. My mother let out a hysterical scream when one of the giraffes wrapped its big purple tongue around her hand. This was very embarrassing to 10 year old me. Sarah and I visited that same zoo a couple of Xxxxxxxxx years ago and now the giraffes were in a much nicer environment and were being fed much nicer food by those of us who wanted to feed them. An older male was isolated from the rest of the giraffe. He and I made friends.

     At the LA zoo, they used to have an open chimp enclosure. Watching these chimps as they frolicked was fascinating. They were hanging around looking like they were waiting for something to happen. One of the older males farted, and all the chimps laughed. Then he stood up, stuck his finger in his butt, and farted again, but with some added special effects. All the animals and all the humans laughed big and loud.     

        Another time, watching the same chimps,  these two human jerks start imitating the chimps and calling them names and one threw an empty popcorn box at the largest one. The large chimp stood and slowly got closer to the young men. They were mocking him. He reached behind him and shit into his own hand, threw it, and hit one of the young men squarely in the face. The other chimps, and all the humans watching, applauded and laughed.

       On Lee Street there was an arrogant Tom cat who ruled the neighborhood. He was definitely the alpha male. The old lady across the street and I both left food out just for him. Actually, he would come up to the door and he would knock on it with his enormous paw to announce that he was ready for lunch. He never allowed me to touch or pet him. But as the years went on, he lost his alpha status. He was showing up with more and more wounds. One time I was sitting out in front and he came and sat next to me and allowed me to pet him. A couple of months later he stopped coming around. The old  lady across the street and I both knew, and we both mourned.

     When I was five I was given a little turtle that lived in a plastic swimming pool. It had an amazing smell. They are illegal to have now, but you can still find them in Chinatown. When I see them I must stop and have a sniff. The summer I turned six we moved. Somehow the swimming pool and the turtle toppled, and the turtle disappeared. A year later when we moved again and we found the turtle alive and well behind the couch. A survivor! I found the plastic swimming pool and made him comfortable at our new house. He died within a couple of days.

        Over the years there has possibly been a dozen aquaria, a couple of snakes, hamsters, and a Guinea pig or two. In the first half of my life, there were so many experiences with animals, foreign and domestic, familiar or exotic, casual and formal.

            I hope you enjoyed this shortened collection of animal stories.