Please Don't Eat the Daisies

My daughter wants a pet.

Actually she wants lots of pets. She also wants to be a veterinarian and is considering becoming a vegan (if only shrimp were not so scrumptious). I think this is typical tween female behavior. Life is all puppies and kittens and kindness and who-could-forgive-themselves-for-putting-their own-selfish-interests-ahead-of-that-sweet-innocent-piglet-and-eat-that-BLT at that age.

How would she have survived the times I grew up in with all the posters and propaganda and protests about the damn baby seals?

She has pets. At her father's. The long promised Daddy-will-get-you-a-puppy-at-his-house puppy finally materialized, after the fish and gecko came and went, and the guinea pig could not satisfy the commitment.

She wants a bird. Or a hamster. Or a llama.

I do not. I do not want to invite anything into my home that is not going to someday use the toilet independently or cook for itself, or which cannot be relied upon not to gnaw my sofa and loveseat to shreds during a thunderstorm. Or who will never not need me for something every single day to survive. It is bad enough that my children don’t listen to me. I can’t begin to imagine the enduring frustration of life with something for whom my words will always sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher.

If I ever cave, or if I am ever the unwitting heiress to some beloved friend’s pet something-or-other, I know exactly what will happen. I will fall immediately and irretrievably in love with the little fuzz ball and will feel nothing short of gravity’s pull toward it…and will begin a terrible habit of coming immediately home from work to feed it, will skip nights out with the gals because it will feel abandoned, eschew all hotels that discriminate against pets because I can not leave it at a kennel while I go to the Outer Banks, and will spend pounds of money making sure it has proper veterinary attention for all manner of illnesses, worms, nail clipping, teeth cleaning and whatever else the veterinary racket deems it would be abusive to ignore.

My mother Estelle was the same way. And her “don’t you dare bring that puppy home and let me fall in love with it” practicality was earned honestly. She must have known she would leave. And to leave yet one more thing might just be the straw that broke her camel's back.

There was a dog that lived near us known as Snowball. Snowball was an oversized, exuberant, slobbering, uncontainable St. Bernard who was the well-known, good-natured menace of the neighborhood. Snowball would often appear in one’s yard, having bounded energetically out of his own yard with half of his chain attached (the other half still affixed to the tree) in pursuit of the mailman, and would get distracted by children and swing sets and stick ball games. He’d invariably have several articles of clothing – a brassiere or a blouse or some delicate thing – stuck to him or his chain. And would previously have dragged his chain round and round his yard in his own “dog mess” as Estelle would have called it. The “messes” being roughly the size of a human head. Mom loved this dog.

But Estelle, hoping to save her line-drying laundry one day as she saw Snowball galloping in the distance, went outside to bring it all into the house. She was the neighborhood fashion maven in brand new, blinding white hip hugger bellbottom jeans, which she paired with a lemon yellow mid-drift bearing top, hoop earrings, and some poofed up cap that held her hair up under it with just little “tendrils” (as she called them) peeking out. If memory serves, she was wearing wedge sandals that were unreasonably high to be clopping about the house in.

And in the middle of her laundry rescuing effort, Snowball spotted her and came a-running. Round and round her he bounded, overjoyed to see his friend. And as he did, he tied Estelle’s knees tightly together – all the while smearing “mess” that was embedded in the chain links all over the prized jeans.

I don’t remember a funnier scene from my childhood. But I do remember understanding finally my mother’s resistance to pet ownership. Sometimes things, even if you love them, are much easier to love when they are in someone else’s yard. No messy physical entanglements to deal with, and no messy emotional entanglements either.