Category: pets

Marvin: a short tale of a small rat

One the first pets I had as a child was a pet rat. (The first ever pets were some goldfish.) I was quite young when we got him, perhaps 5, so I may have some of the details muddled in my brain. But this is Marvin’s story as I remember it.

Marvin was a rat that had been a class pet in my sister’s first grade or second grade class. When Marvin needed a home, we got to keep him.

An important thing to know about this circumstance is that Marvin was our pet at our father’s house. Certainly not at our mother’s house. You see, our parents separated when I was three years old, and we spent the next few years living part-time with each of our parents. My sister and I were always together, but some of the time we lived with our daddy, and some of the time with our mother.

Marvin was a white rat with brown spots. He was small as rats go, definitely a domesticated variety of rat, and not your big scary urban rat. He had a pink tail, with a thin fuzz of white fur. He was quite cute and gentle, with very soft fur and dainty pink paws. He got to live on a coffee table in our living room, a circular sort of a tray of a table with a shallow rim, perhaps 10 or 12 inches off the ground. He wasn’t enclosed at all, as for some reason, he hadn’t figured out how to climb off this table. (There was at least one incident when he escaped from his table. He managed to stain the same couch cushion that my sister and I had damaged, with a small burn mark, while testing the Christmas tree lights a few months before. So that cushion ended up with a burn on one side, and a rat poop stain on the other. Which side to offer up for company?)

I was fond of Marvin in my way, and enjoyed occasionally picking him up and petting him. Mostly I observed him going about his business on his disc-shaped island. But I never actually talked to him. At some point, a TV crew came to follow our father around for a morning to observe him in his role as daddy and caregiver to two small children, an unusual role for a man in the 1970s. (There’s more of a story here, which I hope to share at some point.) I remember one of the crew prompting me to talk to Marvin, to get some footage. I was a bit baffled by this request. Talk to him? But he was a rat! He wouldn’t understand. I’d no sooner talk to my toys.

When my father died later that year, we had to give up Marvin as a pet. My mother had a zero tolerance policy for rodents, and wasn’t going to have a rat living under her roof. (Remarkably, she later allowed my sister to bring home a tarantula for a weekend, when that was her class pet. But that was only for one weekend.)

From what I understand, some friends of my father’s either took Marvin or found a home for him. At least that’s what I was told. I never saw nor heard news of him again. I thought about him from time to time over the years, sometime wondered if he really was given a home. I guess I didn’t want to know the answer if it wasn’t the case.

missing Red

Those of you who know us in real life know that we once had a dog. It doesn’t quite seem right to refer to Red as just “a dog.” Because he was really part of our family for many, many years. And he was really a remarkably wonderful dog. I’ve wanted to write about him for a while now.

It’s now been 2 years since Red died, and I still miss him very much.

If you ever call us on the phone, and we can’t get to the phone, we have an answering machine. Ever since John and I started living together, in our various homes, our answering machine message was always more or less the same: You have reached [our phone number], home of John, Alejna and Red. Please leave a message. This led many who called to believe that there were three humans living in our household, and occasionally that John and I had some sort of offspring.

At some point in this house, we got voicemail for our home phone, too. I don’t remember exactly why, but it came in handy if the power went out, or if we were unable to take a call that came in on call waiting. The message for that was the same as usual: You have reached [our phone number], home of John, Alejna and Red. Please leave a message. Except during that recording, Red barked.

After Red died, I changed the answering machine message. It made me too sad to reduce the names to just the two of us, so we just got the abbreviated version. You have reached [our phone number]. Please leave a message. But I didn’t want to record over the voicemail message, the one with Red’s bark. You see, it’s the only recording that I know of with Red’s bark. I don’t know if it means more to me than it would to other people since I work with sound, collect recordings as part of my professional work. Maybe any devoted dog-owner would feel equally attached to that one bark.

For the last 2 years I’ve intended to somehow retrieve that recording, and get it onto a computer. I know that there are ways to call phone numbers from a computer, such as Skype, but these generally involve a charge for that type of service. So I put it off. And the voicemail message stays the same.

People don’t often reach our voicemail, but it happens from time to time. Sometimes you just can’t gracefully switch over when a call comes in on call waiting. But I find myself rushing to try to answer the calls, to beat the voicemail. Because I’m sure it’s unsettling for people to get this message from another era, to hear that bark from the past.