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.