tortoise

Two nights ago, I was traumatized by a good dream. Ever have those? Something wonderful happens in the dream and you wake up, smiling, only to realize that it didn't happen. I used to dream entire Fridays that way, wake up smiling to greet the weekend, only to realize that I had to do the entire damned thing all over again. For the rest of the day I'd experience bitter, acid-tongued deja vu. It was even worse when it was Monday I dreamed of on Sunday night; my entire week would be disoriented; the Monday wouldn't be half as bad, by comparison to the overall disjointedness of the other four days.

The dream two nights ago was almost along those lines, except that time passed to an extreme that rarely happens to me. In my dream, I bought two kittens, which I subsequently raised for several years. I loved these cats. They were soft and fuzzy and didn't make me sneeze and trailed me around my apartment and then my house -- I moved in the interim -- with canine devotion.

Then I woke up and they weren't there and, oh, it was like I'd actually lost a long-loved pet. Two of them. At once.

I told The Guy about the dream last night, and he told me I should just get them. "You obviously want cats," he remarked.

"I can't. They'd eat the turtles."

Oh. That's right. I wanted to talk about the tortoises, and that's why I'm writing this entry. I knew I'd remember eventually.

I was sitting on a chair in my living room, doing what I usually do in the living room -- play the damned Playstation -- and I was flicking, bored, but hypnotized, through a combat sequence on Grandia when I felt a little tickling on my feet. I looked down, and found one of the tortoises gravely scrutinizing my sock.

"I don't think you can eat that," I told it.

The tortoise, paying no heed, opened his little mouth and began gnawing on the cotton.

There is a great dignity to tortoises; the ponderous way they move, the wrinkles on their little faces, even the way they keep their eyes half-lidded all point to a grand self-possession that is more commonly the domain of predators. That isn't to say that there aren't certain predatory instincts in tortoises, herbivores though they may be. The latest addition to the household, Seven, replacement for the overgrown Morla who was deported back to Southern California for constantly kicking poor Lucky around, has an insatiable appetite for anything at or below his eye level. He'll wander around the living room with the deliberation of a repo auditor, pausing every so often to nibble experimentally on the carpet.

At times, when there's nobody around and I've little better to do than watch myself breathe in a mirror somewhere, I'll sprawl down next to the turtle enclosure and watch them placidly going about their daily business of eating, sleeping, and crawling. At some point the trauma of being attacked by a well-meaning but overly enthusiastic dog traumatized Lucky, who lived up to his name by cracking his shell and living to tell about it. He spends most of his time burrowing in corners and watching his more ambitious brother eat his way through a Peter Rabbit story.

Number Seven owes his name to the number pasted to his back, a little tag that credits him with his order of egg cracking. "Like Voyager," I identified wisely to my roommate when she first told me his name. My roommate, a frighteningly fashionable, glamorous Korean woman with the body of a model and the brain of a business major, stared at me blankly.

"What? It makes sense, doesn't it? Lucky Seven?" She knows not Star Trek, and Star Trek knows not her.

The same weekend that my mother was here, my roommate's parents came into town from Southern California, and on some chance moment when me and mine were out of the apartment, her and hers descended en masse to inspect her new digs. Her retelling of the event was comical, to say the least; after checking over the well-being of the tortoises, her mother straightened to be confronted by a little array of toy turtles all neatly lined up and dusted on the media center.

"Who gave you these?" she apparently asked.

"Oh, they're not mine. They're my roommate's."

"Nice television. Oh, you have a DVD player...and a video player," her parents approved. Her brother sat down and started playing the Playstation. "When did you buy it? How much was it? Where did you get it?"

"I didn't," she said. "It's my roommate's."

"Whose sofa is this?" asked her mother.

"It's my roommate's."

"And this bookshelf? Is this yours? Are you reading all of these?"

"My roommate's," she said.

"This is a good-sized dining room table," her father approved. "The chairs are comfortable. Are these--"

"My roommate's," she said.

"What an interesting lamp...."

"My roommate's," she said.

At this point, her parents looked at each other and wrinkled their brows. "Is there anything in this apartment that's yours?"

She gave it some thought. "The bed in my room," she listed, "and this lamp in this corner, and ... oh, a few of the books are mine. And," she added, brightly, "this coffee table."

"You bought it?" they asked.

"Oh, no. The landlord called me up one day and said one of the neighbors was throwing it away, and did I want it, so I picked it up from the sidewalk and he helped me bring it up to the apartment."

"A roommate that loves turtles and brings all the furniture," marvelled her mother. "What are the odds?"

The Guy is headed back to England shortly to visit his family, and for the purpose he's gone and bought a used digital camera from a friend. Thus, the pictures of the tortoises, who doubtless regard this development in the same light that Europe views a Disneyland staffed by the French.

I originally thought it a fun toy, but now he's hovering over my shoulder taking snapshots of the back of my head. I'm starting to understand how the tortoises feel. Posted by yhirata at July 24, 2001 11:33 PM