I came across this story as I went through old paperwork and found a clipping of “My Son, The Scientist,” which was printed in The Daily Gleaner in 1995. My son has long since grown up and though he became an engineer and later an aviation tech in the military, he never lost his passion for science, especially for discovering whatever he could by reading and observing nature. I still get a smile thinking of this true story so I thought I would relate it along with some other memories here in my blog. I am sure there are parents who can relate and I hope you enjoy it.
From a very early age, my son decided he would be a scientist. In the name of science, he collected samples of everything he could (or was allowed). I am sure other parents can relate. For example, did they ever sit down to supper to discover a jar of beetles or caterpillars next to their plate? Or were they told to be extra careful while cleaning freshly caught fish so as not to damage the internal organs? He wanted to study them later.
One time I had a beaver tail and paws stored in the freezer. Our neighbor often skinned for trappers and our son had asked for the parts for show and tell. That was another story in itself. For some reason, the teacher left the frozen parts to sit on the radiator in the classroom that day. It didn’t smell the best when he brought them home.
An old microscope of his father’s was a treasure for all his ‘research’ but I wasn’t so enamored with the red dye used to stain the specimens. Occasional spots were common but at least once, his entire hands were dyed red and that just doesn’t come off with a casual scrub. As it happens, our son’s enthusiasm for all things nature and science was equally matched by his ability to create messes that weren’t easy to clean up himself. I know many would think any problems would be easily solved by saying ‘no’ to many of his interests, but it wasn’t that easy.
Besides the obvious reason to encourage his mind, my allergies at the time had forced us to say ‘no’ to furry pets. We had relatives take his cats, where he could still visit them, but I am afraid I bent over backwards to make it up to him. That meant letting him keep ‘less furry’ pets. He had a large turtle and hermit crabs for starters. My husband and I each kept fresh water aquariums even before being married so we had two tanks which often had a ‘pet’ crayfish or two. We also had an ant farm and about every creepy crawly that could be found in our yard.
One day when he was about seven, I was weeding my flower garden and nearly grabbed a garter snake. It was over a foot long and harmless, so being a good mother of a budding scientist, I very gently picked it up just behind the head. I ran to the house and called through the back door for my son. He came out to see what I had found and was suitably impressed. He told me most mothers don’t usually catch snakes. Naturally, I was very proud of myself and my newfound status.
That feeling lasted about two seconds, ending when I told my boy to “say good bye to Mr. Snake”. I was hit with a floor of tears when he realized I wasn’t ‘gifting’ him with this creature, and besides the flood of disappointment from him, another flood hit my conscience, as visions of a three-year-old being torn from his beloved cats exploded on me like a firestorm.
The choice of pet cats or breathing didn’t seem like a fair trade and he knew he had me as soon as he saw my face. He wasn’t playing me but he knew an opportunity when he saw it, the look of doubt and guilt. I had relented but only temporarily, as he wanted to show his dad when he came home from work and we agreed it would go back to the yard then. In the meantime, we dumped out a huge jar for a makeshift home.
Hindsight revealed I should have seen trouble coming when he named it. Anything with a name is NOT temporary. (You learn these things when you have kids. I never got the manual with him so I learned as I went rather than know enough to head things off.) Once we saw the jar was too small and the snake wouldn’t be happy in it, his tears ran again and I grabbed my car keys for a quick trip to the local pet store.
While the store owner found a bargain priced 15-gallon aquarium, cheap because of a crack, our boy literally chased down other customers, proudly showing off ‘Robin Hood’. Yes, that was its name. No, I don’t know why. Also, while we were out, Robin regurgitated a very large earth worm and then ate it again. This thrilled the boy but I could have lived without seeing that.
Once home, I hurried over to our neighbor, a carpenter, to get a top made for the tank. By the time I had rearranged my son’s room to make space for a table and the tank, my friend had a piece of plywood cut to fit, complete with air holes. The top was a bit warped, but as long as it was shoved down tightly, nothing could escape.
You may have guessed, somewhere between the agreement to keep it until his dad came home and arranging his room, keeping it was no longer temporary. I can’t remember just how it happened and if I had to think about it at the time, I might still have wondered. I think part of my guilt from having to rehome his cats on doctor’s orders was knowing how rich my childhood was, rich, in part, because of the animals included in our family. As a baby, a very protective collie named ‘Jock’ became my ‘walker’, letting me pull myself up by grabbing his fur and then walking slowly around the house. It is my earliest memory. Add to that the fact we were blessed with loving and attentive cats so as much as I love other animals, nothing filled the gap of cats and dogs.
We gently dumped Robin Hood into his new home, complete with sods of living grass, sand, a dish of water, and three grasshoppers my boy had caught. All was right with the world. My son beamed and I felt the perfect mouther. Later, my own mother would tell me I had rocks in my head. Thanks, Mom, and you were right.
The next morning, I heard a noise in the kid’s room, a bumping kind of noise sounding suspiciously like the plywood knocking into glass. I ran in time to see him breaking the one rule to do with the snake. The tank cover was on his bed. He had the snake out without his father or I with him. That is what I should have expected, having the tank in his room for starters, and his being a curious little kid.
His eyes bugged out when he saw me and he scrambled to replace the snake and the top. After giving him a scolding, I left to work downstairs. About an hour later, he yelled from upstairs that he couldn’t find the snake. I was positive it had just gone under a clump of grass as it had done before, but I couldn’t see him either. Then I noticed the top wasn’t on as tightly as I thought it had been.
I nearly broke my back lugging that tank down and outside. There I shook out each clump. Finding nothing, I imagined company falling faint in our living room after ‘Robin Hood’ slithered over their toes. Not everyone is as casual about snakes as we were.
By the time I was done dismantling our son’s bedroom, it looked as if we’d been hit by an 8.8 earthquake. But snake or not, I had to go downtown for errands. Reluctantly, I left the search but only after plugging the bottom of our son’s bedroom door so the snake couldn’t go any further. (Remember the old idiom that goes something like, “No sense in closing the barn door after the horse has bolted”? Apparently, I had forgotten that one at the time.)
I managed to get the both of us in the car and left to pick up my husband’s grandmother to get her groceries. Since my head was on the snake and not completely what I was doing, I realized before long that I forgot the wrenches to return for replacement, an errand for my husband. I got back home, hurried back inside and grabbed them off the deacon’s bench below the stairs. I started to run off with them but as I did, I had a sickening realization. I yelped and tossed them as one of the ‘wrenches’ wiggled.
Still shaken from the surprise, I watched as the snake, head held high, quickly winded his way for the living room. Seeing it intended to disappear again, I finally came to my senses (in more ways than one) and grabbed him up just behind the head just as he was slipping under the couch.
Waiting in the car, our boy and his great-grandmother had heard me let out the screech (of surprise as I am not scared of snakes). As I was coming back out, I heard him through an open window. “Mommy found my snake”, he told her matter-of-factly before even seeing what I was holding.
I went to the car and told him to say good-bye to his escape artist one last time before I released him into the wild. I guess the look on my face told him I was beyond being talked out of it so he took him and let him go himself.
Gradually, I came to realize what was causing my severe asthma. The doctor’s orders to ‘get rid of the cats’ had come from a knee-jerk reaction to an asthmatic having cats and no predisposition to consider food allergies, which was my problem. and we slowly acquired more furry pets, some being rescues. I couldn’t say ‘no’ to them. I did say ‘no’ to the ant farm. The holes were too big so they got out, of course.
We even had hamsters. I did find I am allergic to rodents when we had a house full of them. We had started out with two females who happened to be pregnant when we bought them. One of the babies even escaped from a tall aquarium upstairs and I had another little shock to find it in a box of crackers downstairs in the pantry about a month or so later. That was a bit of a head scratcher.
We had to find homes for the hamsters as there was no doubt about my allergies that time but we kept adding to our menagerie, sometimes temporarily as we helped injured animals. Over the years, we raised budgies, ducks and geese, with a budgie and a duck nursed from cracked eggs, something I was told wouldn’t work.
For the ducks and geese, they didn’t just imprint on us. The ducklings decided our collie mix was their mother and followed him everywhere, even into adulthood. ‘Duster’, a born herder, even helped nudge them up onto his back when they wanted to snuggle when he was lying down. It probably was better than having them scratching their way up to nestle in his long hair.
If the ducks weren’t going to come out of the long grass to be penned, which often happened when they were feasting on slugs, Duster would dive into the hay and come out behind them. They protested loudly but still went as he directed, bringing them to me so we could both shoo them into the barn safe from nighttime marauders.
But then, these are all more stories yet to tell.