Azul in the Corner, the turkeys strutting in the new year and Azul giving Jim the eye, photo © 2008 by Jim. All rights reserved.
I remember spending Easters at my grandparents’ farm in northeastern New Mexico. My cousins who lived nearby invariably got among their chocolate rabbits and Peeps those live pink, blue, and green dyed chicks and ducklings. I longed for such an exotic pet.
Grandpa raised rabbits, sheep, and pigs for food, and before we loaded ourselves into the Caprice for the long drive back to Albuquerque, I’d begged my parents until I was blue in the face for a baby anything we could take home with us.
We lived in a bucolic neighborhood where, although it wouldn’t have been the norm, it wasn’t out of the question to have a pet chicken or rabbit hanging out in the backyard. But for the most part, people in our slice of suburbia owned dogs, cats, the occasional hamster, and for a short period of time while they were all the craze, a tiny turtle in a plastic aquarium.
I had two such red-eared slider turtles. I named them Gertrude and Henrietta. They lived a boring and tortured life on my bedstand. I regularly let the water in their dish evaporate until the poor turtles nearly dried out. Either that or I picked them up constantly, their little legs flailing in the air.
Eventually Gertrude and Henrietta died. Tiny turtles as pets came to an abrupt end when the adorable reptiles were linked to salmonella and banned. From that point on, I was allowed no pet more exotic than our black mutt, Gilligan. Even my tom cat, Tiny Roy, was secretly exiled to the animal shelter.
As an adult who is now free to have any pet I want as long as it’s legal and I can care for it emotionally, physically, and financially, I’m finally in a position to live my childhood dream. So it is with some sense of bafflement that I look around me and see that, besides the bullsnake we inherited, our pets consist of two dogs and six turkeys. Well, and one duck. (OK, we also have a horse, but he won’t be living here with us until spring.)
I guess I thought that by now I’d have a wildly diverse menagerie. Talking birds, giant lizards, colorful fish in a big glowing tank. A hedgehog, pot-belly pig, pygmy goat, and miniature donkey. Not to mention a herd of mustangs and possibly two llamas. Maybe even an ostrich.
What happens to a kid’s sense that anything is possible? Do we grow up and figure out that nothing is pragmatic?
Sure, turkeys are unusual. I always heard that they’d peck out a child’s eye thinking it was a shiny button. Ours are not nearly so dangerous; they won’t let you get close enough to their beaks to poke out your eyes.
I suppose there’s still time to grow our petting zoo, although I have a feeling it’s as big as it’s going to get. My own kids aren’t begging for any animals other than what we have. By satisfying their wishes for chickens, turkeys, and ducks, we’ve inadvertently pre-empted the kind of longing I had as a child for something — anything — more exotic than a dog or cat.
I swore to my parents that I could keep a horse on a postage stamp sized lot behind our house.
I would draw endless overhead views of what the area would look like with fence and mini-barn.
The horse would know what time it was, and come to get me after school at the bus stop so I wouldn’t have to walk home. That would happen after he had taken me to the bus stop in the morning in time to get to school.
We would spend hours on weekends roaming the fields.
I asked every birthday and Christmas, and pined so, that one year my grandfather actually asked if he could get me one.
It didn’t happen…and boy, am I glad!
I would have been about as successful a horse mommie as I was to my waterless turtles!
BTW…those are some exotic turkey colors…
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You let your turtles go waterless, too?!
That was a rich horse fantasy life you had, leslie. I esp like the idea of the horse taking you to the bus stop each morning.
A horse, for me too, was my ultimate dream animal. I did find a place we could board one, but I think my parents made it so clear that they weren’t budging on the matter that I switched to begging for a bunny instead.
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Great details in this piece, ybonesy. The link to the red-eared sliders takes me back. I think my brothers might have had turtles. I know one had a hamster. I had never heard of the dyed chicks. That’s a great link, too, with details on how they dye them. Controversial.
Your question is a good one for those who always wanted to own all kinds of pets as kids (afraid that wasn’t me! I was happy with my baseball glove and books!). What happens to that desire?
It’s weird but I think we *do* get more pragmatic as adults. Time seems at a premium and, let’s face it, pets of any kind (as beautiful and non-judgmental as they are) take a lot of work in the upkeep area. And financially, they take a few greenbacks, too.
Jim, great layers and color in the photograph. I think turkey feathers are beautiful (though to me, all feathers are amazing. I collect them). I mean, check out the tawny ones on the back turkey in your photo. Patterns are starting to emerge as I see more of your work – the way your eye sees the world. You can learn a lot about people by following their photos over time.
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I really like the layers and color, too, QM. And the sense of movement in the photo. One of Jim’s early photographs that his parents have framed in their house is of wild horses running. It’s a stunning photo. He has a highly developed sense of nature and the physical world.
Re: feathers, I have a gorgeous slate gray feather that I’ve been wanting to scan to see how it translates into digital. We also find some pretty feathers in our yard. Lots of birds around here. I found an orange one with a black dot. Small (the feather).
Yes, the colored chicks are definitely controversial. I remember they often died within a day or two of Easter. But at that young an age, I was more taken with the bright pinks and purples than I was with any real sense of what was happening to get them that color. Of course, later on we learned that dying the eggs imperiled the chicks.
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My sister always wanted chickens, and she still does! LOL.
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yb, I would have thought you could find small pets in NM. My sister was expert in finding unusual pets, right in the middle of Los Angeles! Of course, we did live a block away from a “desert wash,” along the LA River, before engineers contained it in a concrete channel and put a fence around it. Sister’s favorite animals from the wash were horned toads. She never had them for a long time, they constantly ran away. But she had a way of making up for this flaw in their sociablity…she gave each one the same name. They were all called Corny. Why? Because the scales that overlapped on their soft little tummys were bright yellow! I can still see her swinging on the swing our Dad hung from the apricot tree in the back yard, with a horny toad tucked into the waistband of her jeans. The little creature’s front paws would hang over the top, and its mouth would be wide open. I remember commenting on the fact that it seemed they always spent this riding time with mouths wide open. Her explanation was that they were so excited and happy. I replied that maybe it was a silent scream of terror…but she pooh-poohed my reasoning. My own scream was not at all a silent one, the night when I climbed into bed and felt the scratching and scurrying of a toad between my sheets!!! She also collected tadpoles when rain created puddles in the wash, and they turned into the cutest tiny frogs. My brother came home with a possum once, which was supposed to live in a cage in the back yard. The critter lost his happy home, when my mother reached into the potato bin in the kitchen and felt WIGGLING FUR!!! (Mom could scream even louder than me.) What is the story of Azul’s lovely hue? Between your writing and Jim’s photos, you two should be working for “Arizona Highways” or “National Geographic” mags!
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You saw it too yb…the movement in the photo. Jim’s composition makes your eyes rotate clockwise in a circle…round and round drawn in by the directions of their heads, necks and beaks. It’s really very graphic and the tones are very soothing. I saw the graphic before I ever saw the birds themselves. It has a painterly quality to it.
I can remember as a small child, having peacocks as pets. My Father loved exotic things and I can just barely remember our backyard having a mural he painted on the back of the house, large, strangely grafted fruit trees and those peacocks always prancing around them. To this day I still love peacock feathers…and anything iridescent.
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While looking at the photo, the turkeys have disapeared and I recognized the portrait of myself in your picture – once upon a time, I wanted to be a dog (not to have a dog, but to be a dog) and I have learned to give a bark indeed then.
I have learned not only to give a bark, but to reply to the barks of my dearest friends on four legs …
I smell the wind now… Do you feel too the return of Once upon a time?
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Ah, to be a dog. They are the dearest of animals. Pure love, pure gratefulness. I can’t imagine anyone ever harming a dog. The person who harms a dog (unprovoked) is evil, I think.
I have felt a desire to be a bird, Tomas.
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Heather, the one animal I would add to our little farm here is a peacock. I love the peacock’s daily call. It’s haunting, and I think it’s because someone had a peacock near us growing up. So it’s haunting not just by its nature, but it takes me back to a time the way a particular song might. Plus, they are indeed so beautiful.
Yes, the painterly quality of Jim’s photo. I went and looked at it after I read your comment. The clockwise movement, yes, I see it.
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Marylin, thank you so much. That’s a wonderful compliment. We’d have fun traveling the Southwest, writing and photographing. Would you, too?
I see what you mean about furry creatures (and bumpy ones). Like your sister, I collected baby toads for much of my life. My last foray with baby toads was about two years ago. Em and her class happened to talk a walk along the ditch just after the en masse transformation of tadpoles to baby toads. Em showed up that day with two babies. We put them into a terrarium, and for two days I went Zen with the toads. I watched them for hours, sitting on a stool just watching. I caught tiny beetles and fed the toads, and then I’d watch the toads sitting and waiting until the beetles came the toad’s way. I’d try to herd the toads to where the beetles were; they’d have nothing of it. They’d hop back to their spots to wait. Finally, I decided we needed to let the toads go free. (I also kept a baby toad under my bed in a shoebox when I was a girl — now that you’ve prompted all this memory, I’m going to write about my relationship with toads.)
I also once caught a mouse at Grandma’s house. It had gotten trapped in the feed barrel. I ran inside her house, asked for a Folger’s coffee can. She gave it to me without question, but when I came back inside with the mouse, she screamed and made me throw it out immediately. Ha! Great memories you’ve prompted with your own of your sister.
The image of your sister’s Corny with its mouth open on the swing — especially delightful!!
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Another Jim photo, and i love it. He captured the personality of the turkey.
I saw your post is features on the WordPress Dashboard. Yay!
You bring up so many interesting points about pets, people and families, like the pendulum swinging from your parents to you as a parent, childhood dreams about what the future holds,the world of magic where anything’s possible. It sounds like you’re materializing that world through your writing and your art.
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I had a horse fantasy much like Leslie’s… but once I had let the gerbils starve to death (well, I was only at camp for a week), I stopped begging. I knew there was no point.
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Yay! Turkey Photo!
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(Can you tell I spent my childhood on a chicken farm?)
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Yes, I can tell! Three cheers for turkeys!! I’m with you, TIV. I’ve come to love these birds.
Gerbils, pmousse, kind of like hamsters. Some of my friends had them, kept in shavings with a little treadmill. I was enamored of them for a short while as a kid. Didn’t seem to be very interactive, though.
Thanks, C. I was happy to see that the post got picked up over the weekend on wp. Weekends slow down for us, so it’s nice to have some extra readers that way. I hardly write about politics or religion or sports or technology — so not very many of my posts fit into the wp main page. Glad when one or two make the cut.
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[…] was thinking of Novelty Pets when photographing this Deborah Butterfield sculpture at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden yesterday. […]
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Even though I spent summers on my family’s farm, I never got comfortable with the animals. The way the horses would kick at the back of their stalls all of the sudden at fairs, the sudden appearance of a cow’s face in your own out at the barn and that wild look in their eyes when they have found their way to freedom and need to be persuaded to return. They had nothing on the neighbor’s geese, though, who would rush squawking at visitors. This is memorable when they are as tall as you are. Now, my cousin has three turkeys who think everyone is the bearer of food. They come running at you. They are big.
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Our turkeys had a rare day out yesterday (Jim insisted they needed to have a roaming day), and they ended up congregating in the front door portal. When I drove up with my daughter in the afternoon, the turkeys rushed us. It was amazing. They are so big now, and they’re so bold. Dee thought they were going to hurt her, but they really only wanted food. We’re the food dispensers.
Geese have always scared me. They honk so loud — much louder than turkeys — and nibble at your legs.
Big animals can truly be scary. I took a friend’s 15-year-old daughter to see Dee’s horse a couple of weeks ago, and the 15-year-old was freaked out by the horse’s size. She was so scared of him. And my youngest is not a horse girl, even though she’s had as much exposure as her sister. I think it’s something inside — either you have the bug or you don’t.
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ybonesy, remind me how many turkeys you have left now. And they are all adults now right? I agree with you about the you have it or you don’t thing. When I lived in Montana in my 20’s, I tried so hard to like horses. I mean the way my horseriding friends liked them. But I just couldn’t.
Well, there was the factor that one horse stepped on my foot when I went riding with my friend. But it felt like it was more my uncomfortableness than the horse’s. Like Ivy said, there was fear for me. The size of them next to me. Yet I think they are magnificent animals. And especially running wild like they do in some places.
Ivy, you bring up good points about fear related to domestic animals. I wonder what it is. If it’s true that we have it or we don’t, then what makes those who have it, have it? It sound like you were even visiting your family farm in summers, and it still wasn’t comfortable.
I have less fear about wild animals but only because I respect them for being wild and never get that close to them. (Only close enough to photograph with a long lens.)
The Canadian Geese are everywhere near the lakes and ponds here in Minnesota. And many are scared of them. They can be aggressive if cornered. But I wouldn’t say they are mean.
Hmmmm. More to ponder. I wonder how other people who grew up on farms relate to animals. What if that was your family’s livelihood and the animals scared you to death as a child living there. Who knows.
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Good questions. I have tried. I have periodically been the animal tender. I only got so comfortable with it. You cannot sneak food to horses so I had to just suck it up when I fed and watered them. Chickens can just be mean. They peck at you. Goats. Who can get over their odd eyes? Not me. They had llamas for a little while. I wanted very much to be comfortable with them, they are so lovely with their big dark eyes.
My cousins children are mostly vegetarian by choice and I wonder why more farm kids don’t make that choice, or how they felt the freedom to choose.
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Goats. Who can get over their odd eyes? Not me.
This line made me laugh out loud. Goat eyes. They are, indeed, bizarre. Like giant clearish marbles. Slo eyes, I say. They’re kind of cool in their strangeness.
Dee has zero fear of horses. I’ve probably relayed this before, but a year ago, when she was doing barrel-riding, I could tell her horse was ready to gallop at an all-out pace. Up to then he’d taken it at the pace she wanted, gentle and slow. But he was starting to get into the competition himself. Every time he ran barrels, each time he seemed to want to go faster, like he could sense that Dee was ready each time to take it further. This particular time, man, I was so afraid because I could see it in the way he kind of pranced and danced as he was waiting for the gate to open. And when it did, Whew, like a bullet he shot. My eyes flew to Dee, tried to pick up, Was she scared?, Was she in control?, Was she going to fall off? She was flying, it’s amazing to see a child who has learned to ride without even holding on the horn of the saddle, one with her horse, holding her reins up near her belly button. She and Dooley flew around the first barrel, then the second, and he went faster toward the third and final. Then when he cleared that one and saw the straight stretch for home, that’s when he gave it his all. I almost couldn’t watch, but how can’t you? When she finally stopped him, they walked out of the arena through the exit gate, I ran over to her. Dee, Dee, were you scared??, I asked. She looked at me almost like she didn’t understand my question. No, Mom, she said, and I could tell her experience and mine were completely different based on my fear of the horse and her complete lack of fear.
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QM, we have 6 turkeys left. But given how big they are, they still seem to me like a roaming turkey gang.
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Ivy, llamas are amazing. They scare me a little, too. But after I went on a hiking trip with 5 of them in Montana with one of my friends, I felt a new kinship to them. They do spit though. You’ve got to watch it. 8)
ybonesy, that’s interesting about our relationship to fear, isn’t it? I think the same can apply to emotional fear. Our experiences of it are so different, depending on who we are. I had remembered you talking about Dee that time on her horse. But I hadn’t thought about the relationship to fear.
It reminds me, too, of people who skydive or compete in downhill skiing and jumps. I’m always amazed at how they conquer their fear. But it’s almost like they aren’t conquering it, as much as becoming one with what they are doing. The same way you describe Dee and her horse.
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[…] I used to love animals as a child. I remember one time walking around the yard with my eyes trained on the grass, looking for any living creature. I came across a dead bird, featherless and scrawny, that had tumbled out of its nest in the sycamore tree. I picked up the bird, cried while I dug a little grave, cried while I lay the little body into the hole, cried as I piled the dirt back. […]
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[…] -posted on red Ravine, Sunday, March 27th, 2011. Read about ybonesy’s adventures with turtles over the years in In Praise Of Nature & Garage Sales and Novelty Pets […]
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