turtle memories

amy is knitting a cap for mary, a lady down the hall. we're watching Colombo, waiting to go to the senior center in an hour for their thanksgiving dinner. i'm at loose ends, not wanting to write any more poetry to post on twitter until i know whether or not the whole thing is going under or not. that's the scuttlebutt right now on the media, that elon musk has murdered the company with his unrealistic demands. oh well  . . .  when we run out of columbos to watch i guess we'll start watching murder, she wrote with angela lansbury. that's a show my mom watched when i was a kid -- i thought it was for geriatric ninnyhammers. but now unfortunately i know what the appeal was -- something that requires little mental engagement, has familiar actors, isn't full of sex and swearing, and allows us to fall asleep while watching.

so today i'm reminiscing about turtles. to pass the time before dinner.

there's been a lot of turtles in my life.

when i was a kid you could go into any dime store (the same as today's dollar store) and buy a little green turtle, a red eared slider, for ten cents. the clear plastic bowl, with a green palm tree in the middle, and a bag of colored gravel, cost another fifty cents, and voila! I had myself a delightful little pet. which i usually kept for about four months before it either went belly up in its bowl, or i took it out to let it walk around on the living room carpet, and then forgot about it. it would eventually turn up, completely mummified, at the bottom of the hot air vent behind the couch.  i suppose i ran through a good dozen of them as a child. 

for some reason i no longer remember, i was once allowed to get two newts, instead of a little green turtle, which i kept in a clear plastic bowl with colored gravel. they were much more lively than the turtles. and their bowl needed to be cleaned out much more often than the turtles. i kept them on the fireplace mantel in the living room. (the fireplace didn't work. it was brick, but it had no chimney. it was just for looks.) well, one night my dad came home late from Aarone's Bar & Grill, where he tended bar, and didn't like the smell coming from my newts. so he put the bowl out on the front porch and went to bed. unfortunately, this was in the middle of january. next morning i discovered i owned a bowl of newtsicles.

one glorious summer day when i was about ten the family all went down to the Aarone farm on the Minnesota River for an employee picnic.  i brought along my bamboo pole and a can of worms, spending most of my time on the river bank angling for catfish.  imagine my delighted surprise when i snagged a snapping turtle on my wormy hook! the huge ugly creature reared its ugly head to engulf my hook and a yard or two of line.  i battled him for a good ten minutes, as a crowd gathered on the bank to cheer me on. the brute finally snapped the line and disappeared under the churning muddy water.  i was the hero of the picnic for the rest of the day. each time i retold the tale to the other kids that day the snapper got bigger and our struggle lasted longer and became more fantastic, until as the sun began to set i had convinced myself that the turtle had pulled a knife on me so I had to shoot it with my colt 45. 

pet turtles were not the only turtles i had at home.  

a mile or so from our house on 19th avenue  southeast, in minneapolis, was a swampy waste that was part of a railyard/warehouse industrial park.  the roads were unpaved, there were no sidewalks, and dirty channels of water crisscrossed the area. in which lived a passel of frogs and herds of false map turtles, about as big as dinner plates.  i tried forever to catch the frogs, with no luck, but i was able to capture a nice big turtle, which i brought home. not finding a suitable place to put it, i appropriated by dad's aluminum beer cooler and turned it into an improvised turtle pond, filled with sand, water, and little dots of speckled green duckweed -- which is what i assumed my new capture ate. when my dad finally missed his cooler (which didn't take very long, since he drank enough beer each summer to float a battleship) i was duly punished for my vandalism by being sent to bed without supper. my turtle was dropped off at Como Lake to start a new life. 

ah, como lake!  where the como zoo was, and still is, located. we went to como zoo every summer to visit the fragrant monkey house, watch Sparky the Seal perform, and ride the giant tortoise. yes, in those environmentally unfriendly days they kept big ol' land tortoises at the zoo for little boys & girls to ride upon. 

my last turtle memory was 30 years ago, when i was in the habit of taking long walks around como lake. one spring day as i was walking along the macadam path i spied up ahead a large nasty-looking snapping turtle, traveling away from the lake up into the tall grass to lay her eggs. joggers were casually passing by her, apparently unaware that a female snapping turtle about to lay her eggs is a pretty ornery critter and apt to snap off any ankle that came too close. so i got me a branch to wave in front of the snapper's nose. she bit into it with a vengeance and i was able to pull the tenacious snapper off the macadam path and into the cattails so she could lay her eggs in peach and quiet. they had to close the lake path down for a few days that spring so the mother snappers could cross over to the tall weeds to deposit their eggs in the tall weeds. 

i wonder if amy would let me have a little green turtle? i wonder if they still sell them anywhere like Petsmart?

maybe i better try for some more newts, instead.