the cheese stands alone

Marlon Perkins Would've Been Proud

I'm all nostalgic, in a very beastial way.
This post over at Publius & Co. got me thinking about my own pet rats from the past, and then I went wandering down memory lane and all my pets popped into my mind. And much in the way the cure for an earworm is to sing the entire song, the only way I can get my furry babies to rest and let me get some mental peace and quiet is to make a list...

1. My first pet was a dachshund named Alvin. No, that's not exactly true. I had some goldfish for nearly a week before my brother decided they needed to take a walk with him.
2. We had more cats than I can remember the names of when I was a child. Every time one of us would bring home a kitten, in all fairness the rest of us would get a kitten. Invariably every kitten we brought home was already pregnant. Some kind of spontaneous kitty mitosis or something.
3. We did have memorable dogs.... we had MickeyMichael (my mother had to double-name all our dogs), who'd had a high fever as a puppy and consequently was never a day over 3 months in his addled little dogbrain. There was MabelMichelle, who we adopted at a campsite as a ragged bag o'bones and who died so incredibly fat she could not lie on her side without the upper legs being unable to touch the ground, and who smelled like the diaper pile at the baby farm. (Yes, there is such a place as a baby farm, it's where babies come from, go ask my mom if you don't believe me. And if you kiss boys, you get warts. Everyone knows this.)
ToyToy was all boyboy and never stopped licking it. PepperPrettyPrincess was a butt-ugly semi-poodle who freaked out and PromptlyPiddled whenever you called her name.
4. I had a sweet cairn terrier named Conan, who my ex-may-she-rot-in-hell-mother-in-law promptly absconded with and refused to give back on the grounds she'd had him baptised and I was an atheist and unfit to raise him.
5. Then there was Caviar, the meanest ferret known to man. He'd take a finger off if you gave him lunging room. I gave him to my ex-may-she-rot-in-hell -mother-in-law with instructions that he liked to be petted.
6. I had a paraplegic guinea pig named Quatro, rescued from the pet shop where cruel previous owners had returned him damaged. He only lived another week, but he was a sweetheart, which led to my acquiring Stewart, an atypically anti-social guinea pig. He'd scream like a... well, like a pig, whenever you'd try to pet him. He lived for over 6 years, like a car alarm on a Ferrari in South Central.
7. Carlyle was my ball python, bought as a six week old bit of wiggly string and with me for over 12 years, when he retired to a career with a traveling animal show upon our disastrous move to Hawaii, whose short-sighted morons-in-charge would not allow him to come with us. Damn you, you spam-eating, hula-hula fascists! And your little poi too!
8. My rats started as rejected dinners for Carlyle (sorry, Victor!) and wound up as pets. Alan grew to the size of a soccer ball. Mr. Potatohead and Dionysus refused to be separated. Vlad bit everyone. Lump rarely moved.
9. However, in Hawaii, in addition to Squeeks, the neurotic cat who came to us from the inHumane Society, we cared for (in a three year period) over 55 stray cats. By the time we moved, we were going through 40 pounds of cat food a week.
10. Currently, I make do with my goldfish (Tallulah, Tammyfay, Leslie, Manny, and Bruce) and my betta (Carson). They're under the illusion that they're starving to death and beat themselves senseless on the front of the aquarium, begging to be fed five minutes after I've done just that.

I've left out the gerbils that my mother thought would be a good lesson in responsibility for us and which we all ignored, the five minute parakeet ("don't take it out of the cage, not with the cats in here... no, I said DON'T take... oh hell."), and the dog we fed for five years only to discover it belonged to the neighbor down the block who thought it was anorexic because she couldn't get it to eat.
I miss each and every (almost) every one of them, too.