Suddenly my dad had developed an interest in birds. Now he would have loved a parrot or cockatoo but due to money constraints, all he could afford was a budgie. I don’t know if you have ever had or seen a budgie but it is just about the most useless bird-like thing ever created. It looks like a miniature parrot. When I say miniature, I am talking about 5-6 inches long, maximum. They are pseudo colorful and have no interesting attributes. All they do is eat, shit, flap around their tiny cages, and make a screech-like chirping sound with no redeeming attirbutes. My dad brought one home one night in this tiny box covered with breathing holes and pictures of much more extravagant birds. I remember when he bought the first one I saw the box and pictured this grocery store with an entire shelf covered in these boxes of birds. He always made sure to show my mom in front of us so she couldn’t outwardly express her distaste for this new pet she knew she would end up looking after. Mike would spend hours trying to teach this useless creature how to talk and do tricks, but nothing ever happened. It would just keep chirping away and he would eventually give up and grab a drink.
Happily, we went through several of them. You see, if they ever escaped they’re cage(which was often) they would quickly head for the outside, which usually meant flying full force into one of our many closed windows. (This was one of the only pleasures of having a budgie because a dead budgie is a really cool thing). When they fly top speed into windows they break their neck and their entire body goes stiff except for their now broken neck. At this point we would pick them up and watch their heads flop back and forth. This lead to hours of entertainment, at least until mom found us and made us drop them before we caught dead bird disease. What finally ended my dad’s budgie love was the morning my brother covered the entire kitchen floor in cereal and then let all the birds loose to feed on the corn flakes. They all of course took this opportunity to fly into the windows and break all their necks…
Archive for May, 2008
Mike’s Budgies…
Tia & Maria…the dogs, not the drink. Part Two
Now Tia was a different story. She not only held on for a while but she also put up with a lot of crap. She never got hit by a car, and we moved to a safer area, at least for dogs, but she does have the distinction of being the first of our dogs to discover porcupines.
We had a summer home about two hours north of Toronto. It was on a lake and surrounded by forests and other cottages. In these forests lived all sorts of creatures like foxes, skunks and porcupines. Now Tia did have a few run ins with skunks, but that’s nothing a tomato juice bath won’t take care of…yes they actually work. But facing off with a porcupine is a different deal all together…
I remember running up to greet her and suddenly noticing what looked like hundreds of spikes sticking out of her nose and mouth. They looked really cool because they were this really neat combination of white and black, and extremely sharp. Tia seemed pretty okay with the whole thing except that her eyes were extremely glassy. I ran next door to grab Aunt Wendy who was an ex nurse, the closest thing to a vet I was going to find up there. She got my mom(no Dads were to be found at our cottage during the week, they were at work) and then she grabbed a pair of pliers and asked me to hold Tia. She said this wasn’t going to hurt much and I thought she meant herself because there is no way she was going to convince me prying out these quills from my dogs nose was going to be a painless procedure.
She then proceeded to pull them out one by one as Tia shook, but remained calm. I guess at this point, Tia knew anything would be better than living the rest of her life with several spikes protruding from her face. When it was all over there was no blood and Tia ran off as if nothing had happened. She never tangled with a porcupine again. I wish I could say that for the rest of our pets.
To thank Aunt Wendy for saving Tia and her face I decided to give her my goldfish that I had at the time. I can’t remember its name but I do remember arguing with the pet shop owner over the fact that this particular goldfish was black and white, therefore making its name a complete denial of its true self. To get this gift ready I put the fish in a cereal bowl and scrubbed out it’s container and all the pebbles inside it, I then rinsed it off, filled it back up, put the fish in and headed for Aunt Wendy’s. By the time I got to the back door my black and white goldfish was floating on the top of the water. Apparently I hadn’t rinsed the bowl well enough and my fish choked on the remaining soap suds. I decided not to give it to her. This is the one pet death I take full responsibility for even though there was no intention…so I guess this would be fish-slaughter of the first degree.
A year or two later Tia developed some kind of kidney disease, at least that’s as specific as my parents got. I went to camp that summer(a standard vacation for my parents) and constantly wrote home asking how Tia was. My parents always assured me that she was fine…she wasn’t. When I got back from camp Tia was dead and I was pissed. This was the first time I realized I couldn’t completely trust them. Them being those figure heads we sometimes call parents. I wanted to hold a funeral and bury the body, totally unaware that a garbage and furnace had done the job for me. It was at this point that my parents decided to take a break from pets…well at least dogs…
Tia & Maria…the dogs, not the drink. Part One
After a lot of Geoff and I asking when Inky was going to wake up, Mom and Dad brought home two new dogs. After an incredible name experience like Inky, my parents had decided they would name our pets from now on , and no sooner had they said this, then entered our new Corgies, Tia and Maria. I guess you’ve figured out my Dad’s favorite drink by now. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Corgi before, but there the same dogs as the Queen of England is often seen with…assuming they are still alive, the dogs, not the Queen. This means nothing in the states, but growing up in Canada, people were always saying, “Hey, those are the same dogs as the Queen”. As a kid I had to grasp onto anything I could. Picture the shape of a basset hound , you know, the type of dog Roscow P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard had. You know, Flash? That kind of shape, with the head of a German shepherd, except much smaller, and in there cases, brown and white. They also had there tails snipped at birth, which I think sucks. Imagine if you had your ass snipped when you were born, or any other parts…
Now at this time, we were living in Mississauga, a city on the outskirts of Toronto.
We lived on a dead end road wedged between a major freeway and a 200 foot drop down to the Port Credit river. So if at any time, Tia or Maria got out of the house, we didn’t have long to find them. And they got out quite often. Remember, this was back when dogs roamed their communities freely and leash laws didn’t exist. Its also a time when alot more kids came home with scars from wandering neighbourhood dogs… It also didn’t help that nobody would ever take us seriously when we told them the names of our dogs. If me or Geoff told somebody, they would think we made it up, and if it was parents searching for the lost puppy, strangers would just assume they were drunk. Our lost dog posters were laughed at and almost always torn down as a joke. Eventually our dangerous living situation got the better of us…or should I say, Maria.
Maria has the distinction of being the only Edgecombe dog to be hit by a car, and killed! Now on this sad day I was not allowed out to see what happened so I felt very left out and lost as to what exactly had happened, but Geoff changed all that as any good older brother would. He decided he would show me exactly what happened to Maria. He went to the fridge and grabbed the biggest tomato he could find and led me down to the basement, a place we seldom went alone. He then pulled our deep freeze out a little from the wall, and wedged the tomato between the wall and the fridge. At this point he pushed the freezer with all his might and squished the tomato sending red guts everywhere and said, “That’s what happened to Maria.” To this day I can see that squashed tomato perfectly and that was the image I had of Maria being hit by a car for my entire childhood. When I eventually saw a dog get hit by a car I realized Geoff had painted a pretty accurate picture…It wasn’t Geoff’s best work as an older brother but it must have sunk pretty deep as I still can’t eat tomatos.
Inky…the dog we never meant to drive crazy
First of all I would like to welcome all of you here to Dead Pets and other sories about life. Everything I tell you is absolutely true and is accurate as my 30-something year old memory could possibly make it, excusing of course the standard embellishment one always feels necessary to add when telling a story. Over the years of my existence, my family, the Edgecombes have been through more pets than any one family deserves, or should be allowed. The one common factor in all of our pets is that they all died before their time of unnatural, sometime very unnatural deaths. Now we are not an evil family, and we never killed or let an animal die intentionally, they just have a way of dying around us, not others peoples pets, just ours. To help you I will first introduce my family: First we’ve got Michelle or Shelly, who is the youngest, then there is Joelle, who’s younger than me, but older than Michelle. That’s it for girls, next comes me, the infamous middle child, and then there’s Geoff, my older brother of two and a half years, not three, just a mere two and a half. And in charge, therefore most responsible for all damages, are Barb AKA mom and Mike AKA Dad AKA Champ AKA the Big Guy.
I have chosen to tell you about my dead pets in chronological order, and just to set your minds at ease, I presently own and operate 2 dogs and 2 cats, all in good health with every intention of staying alive and dying someday of completely natural causes…And before you grab your cell to hit the PETA speed dial button please trust that I am an animal lover who has never wished evil upon any animals…excluding my neighbours feral collection of cats that recently removed the eyebrows from my cat Jimmy…
It all started when I was about one or two years old with Inky. Inky was this little off white mutt. Kind of a mixture of , well I don’t know but he was about the size of young spaniel with a long tail for his size and kind of a pale miniature golden retriever look, but he definitely had no retriever in him. Now when I was this age Geoff liked to do one of two things with me, either make me laugh or make me cry. With Inky he could do both. You see Geoff had this little game he played that I now chose to call “make Inky insane”.
He would pick up Inky and put him on tables and then push him off…this was to make me laugh. I thought this was hilarious and he would just keep picking up Inky, putting him on top of what ever table he could reach and then push him off again and again. This of course pissed Inky off to know end but that never stopped us. I say us because it did not take long for me to learn by example. And when I couldn’t find a table short enough for me I would simply pick him up and drop him. You see, I just thought he was a toy. This really cool, fully operational toy, until…he went insane.
This is where the crying part comes in.
At one point Inky snapped from this continuous torture, and flipped. He was no longer going to take this, because due to his present lack of stability, he had now learned, he could fight back. First he would wait until we pushed him of, then he would come at us. Soon, we couldn’t even come close to him before he would start freaking out, and since Geoff was bigger and faster, guess who Inky had the most fun with. It was at this point that he was no longer a pet, or even a toy, but a totally psycho dog looking for payback. Needless to say, Inky was on his way to the big sleep as soon as Barb and Mike realized it was me or him, and don’t think this was an easy decision for them, but at least I had thumbs and in the early 70′s it was easier to lose the dog and just slap the stupid kids around until you knocked some sense into them…Did I mention my parents liked to drink?
