The Animal Lover at Seven and Thirty-seven

by Hannah Melin

        When Avery grows up, she will be an “animal rescuer, just like her Mom!” Every adult in Avery’s life is assigned an animal: a kangaroo for her father, a vulture for her mother. For the first week as her babysitter, I am watched cautiously from behind a stuffed lion. After a week of careful consideration, I am labeled a zebra.

        No jokes are made about Erin’s title as a vulture. Erin grins and swings Avery around in a hug when she correctly recites a fact on the wingspan of an African Condor or the lifecycle of a Common Turkey Vulture. Above their television set, framed photos of Avery in diapers are mixed in with fuzz-headed owlets, fledgling eagles, and newly hatched vultures. Foot-long, sleek black feathers are tucked between well-worn romance novels and dog-training guides.

        Avery’s hands are always ready to grip, touch, and pet. She pinches her crayons tightly between her fingers, drawing savannas with thick, heavy lines. The skin that stretches across her palms is porcelain pale, interrupted only by light freckles. Erin’s hands grip lightly. Arthritis, she says, from zoo work. The skin is paper-thin and as pale as her daughter’s. Scratch marks and scars cover her thin hands, running up past her wrist and onto her forearm. The razor-width cuts seem to track decades of self-harm, a conclusion dismissed only by the photograph of a younger Erin holding up her forearm for a massive Horned Owl to perch.

        Avery sinks into the comfy couch, immersed in a Disney movie while Erin leans against the kitchen counter, staring into her coffee mug while I sip from mine. She talks about the latest tragedy at Animal Kingdom: an aggressive male Grant’s Zebra broke out of his holding pen in the night and into the pen of a resting mother and her three-month-old foal. It trampled the foal to death and ripped off the mother’s right ear. She tears up, covering her mouth as she tells me how the mother whinnied and bayed for hours. She’s furious that the locks weren’t strong enough, but she never blames the male. It’s a survival mechanism, she says, to ensure their genetic line survives. A female won’t mate with a male if she has a foal. The male will kill the foal to confirm his own lineage. She’s glad no keepers tried to intervene during his rampage; she’s certain they’d have been trampled. The attack never makes the newspapers and I try not to wince when Avery gives me a crayon drawing of my animal avatar.

        Avery knows to ask owners if she can pet their dogs before approaching. She assures me that she knows lions, leopards, and tigers are all deeply dangerous creatures. She scoops up Rosie, a Chilean Rose-Haired Tarantula the size of my fist, without hesitation. She giggles as the fanged spider walks across her hands. She asks me if I want to hold her. I decline, but I do let Valentine, a six-inch Corn Snake, wrap around my wrist. Once I’m preoccupied with the small warmth making its way to my fingertips, Avery plops Mr. Bojangles, a six-pound Bearded Dragon, on my shoulder. It scrambles on my t-shirt and falls asleep, staining my sleeve with raspberry juice. Raspberries are its second favorite snack, after live crickets.

        Avery’s best friends are carried around with her at all times. A balding stuffed zebra, a lion Beanie Baby, and a dull yellow dog. If she moves from the room, she scoops them up in her forearms and lines them up in their new position. She engages in a constant dialogue with them. If I ask one of the stuffed animals a question, she responds in a squeaking character voice, but her personal conversations with them are one-sided. She speaks to them, pauses, and continues on with a new talking point. She doesn’t see the point in giving them voice when she already knows what they would say. Erin thinks she’ll grow out of it any day now.

        Erin attended a parent-teacher meeting last month, where one of Avery’s teachers was concerned by Avery’s introversion. She’s the same as Erin was at that age, Erin recalls. Erin seems proud to tell me that Avery prefers animals to people.

        Three months later, Snowball, their twelve-year-old house cat, drops dead in front of her food bowl. Erin sobs into her pillow. It’s too much, she says. Such reactions adds to her belief that her husband will leave her. She thinks her ex-boyfriend has been stalking her (“Make sure you lock the doors,” she tells me, “but I don’t think he’d hurt you”). She’s convinced Avery will spend the rest of her life talking to stuffed animals. She thinks she’s going to lose her job because of her arthritis. To not work with animals, she says, that would be worse than death for me.

        I tell my mother what Erin said on the car ride home. My mother has to pick me up when I watch Avery into the evenings. I’m not allowed to drive at night until I’m old enough to get my Class D.

        Avery chases their Pitbull mix around the yard, whooping and giggling. The sun glints off her hair, turning it into a writhing, glimmering halo. She stretches open her arms, inviting the dog to jump onto her and knock her into the grass. The dog does not bite, but he plays rough. Pink ridges rise across her upper arms where his dewclaw scrapes, not quite deep enough to draw blood. He shoves into her side, hard, but she tackles him back, squealing.

        At age seven, the animal lover knows no fear. She does not bother to adjust for the rest of us. She spends recess hunting for garter snakes and doesn’t bother with the comments made about her on the swing set. She lets every creature, ant and elephant alike, crawl into her heart.

          At age thirty-seven, the animal lover learns the weight of these creatures. She lets every one of them into her heart and onto her skin. They leave more scars than she can count.

(The names in this essay have been changed to protect the identities of those featured.)

Hannah Melin is a writer working out of Dallas, Texas. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida where she worked as the Fiction Editor for The Cypress Dome literary magazine. After graduating, Hannah worked as a literacy teacher for the Peace Corps on islands throughout the Eastern Caribbean. Hannah's nonfiction has been featured in Big Muddy. Her fiction has been featured in Monkeybicycle, Heart of Flesh, Night Picnic Press, and The Metaworker.

From Snitch to Scab

by Richard LeBlond

I began my newspaper career as a snitch, age nine, in 1950. We lived on the northern edge of Portland, Oregon, only three blocks from the cut-over bottomlands between the city and the Columbia River. This intermittently flooded wasteland had been partially filled by railroad beds, stockyards, and disposal areas for industrial waste. To a boy of nine, it was a frontier with high potential for treasure (some of it toxic), and one afternoon I found it. Down at the foot of a railroad embankment were hundreds of advertising circulars all rolled up like small newspapers.

There was no value in the circulars themselves. The treasure lay in how they got there. They were supposed to have been delivered house to house by a boy on a bicycle. I figured he had tossed them like a dead body into the early morning miasma. Delivering advertising circulars was a coveted job, one of the few a child could legally do. I took home a piece of the evidence, and dad called the distributor. I was quickly rewarded with the miscreant’s job.

The circulars were supposed to be delivered in the early morning once a week. Some guy in a truck dumped a large bale of them on our front porch after midnight. Mom had to get up an hour before me to start rolling the hundreds of circulars so I could toss them on porches like the professional paperboys did. But even with her help there was not enough time to complete the deliveries before breakfast and school.

I wasn’t about to devote another morning to the task, let alone a precious afternoon, so it wasn’t long before I realized the practicality of the snitched-on boy’s method. I began to deliver to as many houses as time allowed, then hid the overburden in more secluded areas of the wasteland. The bodies were never found, so I continued distribution of the circulars to the local neighborhood and bottomlands until I finally got a job delivering real newspapers at age eleven.

(There is a parallel between the start of my newspaper career and the beginning for a politician—tear down the unscrupulous incumbent, then discover the job can’t be done by scruple alone. “Politics,” observed socialist Oscar Ameringer, “is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.”)

In the early 1950s, Portland had two dailies, the morning Oregonian and the evening Oregon Journal. My first newspaper job was delivering the Journal in late afternoon, after school. The paperboys gathered at the newspaper’s district distribution center, a sturdy shack at the back of a supermarket parking lot. We had to be there before the newspaper truck arrived, so there was always time to kill, and the favorite place to kill it was in the supermarket’s candy section. Our goal was to shoplift as many candy bars as possible under the ruse of the purchase of one or two. Once outside, we tallied and compared the sweet ephemera.

The nickel-and-dime thievery was of course perilous, and every now and then one of us was caught. But for my group of pre-teen boys in the early 1950s, shoplifting was only a risky option, not the beginning of a wasted life. Better behavior had to compete with peer pressure, unenlightened self-interest, and the inherent goodness of a Baby Ruth candy bar. Most importantly, shoplifting reduced the drawdown of wealth I was acquiring for a bicycle upgrade.

(At the time, I was only interested in the money I was making, and gave no thought to the economic system newspaper delivery represents. We were little franchises. The newspapers themselves were actually being sold to the paperboys, not to the subscribers. Once a month the company handed us a bill, and we collected from the subscribers to pay it. The remainder was ours. Any account unpaid was the paperboy’s problem. He not only received no profit on those accounts, but had to pay the company for the papers he had delivered to the scofflaws. Yet even with the economic assistance of eleven-year-old boys, printed newspapers appear headed for oblivion.)

I became a newspaperman during my senior year of high school, when I discovered that calculus and girls couldn’t be studied at the same time. Getting girls to make out requires effort and focus when competition, pursuit, and anxiety are factored in. I abandoned my dream of becoming a geologist exploring for oil in Venezuela, and amended my curriculum by replacing lonely and cerebral calculus with a very sociable course in journalism. The journalism class was responsible for writing and publishing the school newspaper. I loved sports and got the plum job of sports editor, even though I wasn’t much of an athlete, breaking my arm the first time I tried to swing on rings.

One of my responsibilities after a varsity game was to call the Oregonian and the Oregon Journal to relate the score and a few highlights. That year our football team was very good, and I had kept track of statistics for each player. I began getting phone calls from the Oregonian reporter who covered high school athletics. He wanted those statistics for his weekly column. After a couple of months, he asked me if I would be interested in the most stupendous offer anyone had ever made to me: a one-night-a-week job as a bottom-rung copy writer at the downtown Oregonian building itself, in the exalted sports department.

At first, I just worked Friday evenings. That was game night. Several of us were there to answer phone calls from informants, record the scores and highlights, and write a two- or three-sentence account of the game. My literary career was airborne.

Following high school, I enrolled as a journalism major at Pacific University in Forest Grove, about thirty miles west of Portland. I kept working part-time for the Oregonian, adding Tuesday and Saturday nights to my schedule.

Thanks to the business world’s chronic cost cutting, I was about to get even more work. The newspapers had recently automated another part of the printing process, causing a seventy-five percent reduction in the number of workers needed among members of the Stereotypers Union. In November 1959, the stereotypers went on strike, and members of other unions refused to cross the picket lines.

Managers of both newspapers huddled in the Oregonian building and attempted to print their dailies with non-union help. Tempers flared when non-union workers crossed the picket lines. There were fights. A newspaper delivery van was blown up. Then the managing editor of the sports department called and asked me to be part of the non-union publishing team, with a full-time job. I crossed the picket line with a bodyguard: Dad. My career had entered the scab phase.

“After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles. When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and Angels weep in Heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out.” – attributed to Jack London, probably erroneously.

Whoever wrote it, they were wrong about my having rotten principles. I had no principles, and no politics either, so by default was a Republican like my dad. I had been convinced that crossing the picket line was the right thing to do, even though I felt guilty for it. I continued crossing the line uneasily for another two years. (The strike lasted five years before the unions finally gave up.)

Every now and then, as I crossed the picket line, I would see the reporter who had recruited me from high school. He never spoke to me, but his gaze conveyed admonishment and deep disappointment. It is a gaze that still haunts me, and in my own mythology, it was the beginning of another way to view the world.

Richard LeBlond is a retired biologist living in North Carolina. Since 2014, his essays and photographs have appeared in numerous U.S. and international journals, including Montreal Review, High Country News, Compose, New Theory, Lowestoft Chronicle, Concis, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. His work has been nominated for Best American Travel Writing and Best of the Net.

Daddy Was a Thief

by Perry Glasser

We are not talking about armed robbery or breaking and entering. Not even pickpocketing. Daddy was no crook. You’d risk a punch in the snoot for even suggesting such an idea. Honest, square-dealing, he was no cheat, either, not even at gin-rummy, the card game he played at low stakes with cronies or his children for the sheer fun of the banter.

“What’s the name of this game?”

“Gin.”

“That’s what I’ve got,” he’d say and lay down his cards, laughing.

My father, Dave, considered smash-and-grab guys to be lowlifes; he thought of himself as law-abiding. Unless you count his years as an old man, unsteady on his feet from several toe amputations when he might sneak a mini-Mary Jane or cherry-flavored hard candy from the acrylic bulk sale candy bins at the food market, he never so much as shoplifted.

My mother would scold him, but he’d dismiss her nagging. “They expect a certain amount of the stuff to disappear. Like grapes.”

“That’s not the point,” Muriel would say with exasperation, pushing their cart into the next aisle while Dave inspected the caramels.

His behavior was partly denial, but it was more defiance. A diabetic whose wearying last years were little more than dragging his failing body from one physician to the next, Dad preferred to believe that purloined candy had no effect on his blood sugar. His logic was persuasive; if no one saw him eat, how could the candy be counted against him? The podiatrist, the endocrinologist, the internist, the ophthalmologist, and the vascular surgeon—what they did not know could not harm Dave.

The disease eventually killed him, despite the nutritionist who had prescribed an Exchange Diet, a scheme by which people might control the glucose levels in their blood by attending to the carbs that they ate. Dad understood the instructions to mean you could exchange a body part for hard candy, a deal he did not think was all that bad. The sawbones did their work until his heart failed under anesthesia, yet another case where the operation was a success, but the patient died.

This final event of his life also proved his post-eighty-years philosophy: You have to die of something. A worldview worthy of Lucretius, his resignation was a counterpoint to more than a decade of imposed rules he hated, rules compounded by a regimen of ever-changing pills whose names he never troubled to learn but identified by color and shape. Maybe other men ingested medications; Dad took pink for blood pressure and several shades of blue for everything else.

The body that betrayed him had been his ally most of his life. My father was an articulate man who had enjoyed three semesters of a college education on his football scholarship to William and Mary, quite a turn of events for a Jewboy from the Bronx in 1933. After he left school and worked at odd jobs requiring muscles and not much else, Dad settled on being a housepainter. He hauled drop cloths and ladders, not to mention five-gallon buckets of paint, brushes, sawhorses, rollers and God alone knows what else. In a day when colors were mixed on the spot from pigments whirled by hand into white paint, his eye could match any hint of color in a rug or upholstery. He started his own company, but he was a better craftsman than businessman; rapid expansion in the post-war boom led to bankruptcy in the mid-1950s. His greatest regret was being unable to pay the workmen whom he considered his pals.

Later, Dad maintained an upscale clientele on Park Avenue and the wealthier suburbs north of New York City. Decorators adored his precision and neatness; he charmed client housewives. While painting never could make him rich, most years Dad was able to support a wife and three children in our two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of a building on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, a tonier address than most. When money became scarce, Mom returned to the workforce. I was the youngest, so they looped a hemp cord stringed through a door key around my ten-year-old neck so I could walk home and let myself into the apartment after school.

I am still neurotic about not losing my keys, patting my pants or coat pockets repeatedly. I inspect the floor near my seat before exiting a movie theater. There is no telling what may be inadvertently lost in the dark. It is simply prudent.

As a similar matter of prudence, Dad’s clients locked their liquor cabinets. It was not as though he’d earned their distrust, but everyone knew painters were notorious drunkards. Fact was, no one ever saw Dad touch a drop other than at bar mitzvahs, weddings, and, later in life, at the Irish wakes that marked the passing of his childhood friends. I never saw him drunk, though on a few occasions I did see him merry and bright-eyed with wine. I am sure that clients also placed their silverware and jewelry under lock and key, just in case the soft spoken, well-mannered man in white overalls had sticky fingers.

Their precautions were misdirected.

Dad’s palms itched, but only at the sight of their books and records.

I was mall-shopping with my daughter, Jessica, when some doo-dad in a technology-computer outlet made it into my pocket. The store chain is long gone, bankrupt, either by the collapse of the earliest technology boom or by desperadoes like myself who while passing a workbench littered with wires and screws and circuitry palmed a $.79 adapter plug before a furtive run to the parking lot.

Such items were unmarked; they were probably not even for sale. But that did not prevent a security guard from emerging from behind some one-way glass to pursue me to the car. He was a skinny guy, all red goatee and sunken blue eyes, jeans hanging on his hips like unfurled sails.

My daughter—maybe she was fourteen—looked on while I explained I had had every intention of buying the item, but since it had no wrapper and no price-tag, I’d assumed it was junk and put it in my pocket to keep my hands free and then simply forgot to check at the cashier. Even as I spoke the lie, I realized how lame it sounded. My daughter, Jessica, always my ally, never engaged in adolescent histrionics. No eye-rolling, no deep sighs. She’d come into my custody when she was eight, and we were partners in most things, in this case, partners in crime. I think I could have risked smuggling a valise filled with heroin through airport customs, and even if Jessica would have looked bright-eyed and forthright as a Girl Scout selling peanut butter cookies.

I offered to pay for the doo-dad then and there, but since it lacked any price-tag, the security guard could not tell me its cost. I asked if he was sure it was the store’s property: after all, it had been on a table with a litter of other parts. Maybe another customer had abandoned it. But he was not having any of my excuses. I suppose he had heard them all before. I was fairly sure he could not legally stop me in the parking lot, much less ask me to empty my pockets, but the niceties of law seemed irrelevant on the sunny afternoon.

I handed over the doo-dad. The rent-a-cop sternly told me that he had a photo of me that would be posted in the security office. If I ever showed up in the store again, he would personally make certain the police would be summoned. I imagined a darkened booth festooned with Polaroid pictures of ruthless shoplifters taped to the walls, all of us crazed and desperate wives and husbands, all of whom were steps away from the slammer, all of whom would be incarcerated after a police car came bearing down on us in a Code Three lights and sirens scream.

In our car, Jessica stifled her giggles. “A photo?” she said, and lost control. She laughed harder. She was not humiliated. This was just another day with her father the lunatic. I asked her not to share this story with her friends, and she informed me there was no chance of that.

I smiled and said, “We’re entitled.”

Even as I said so, I remembered Dad and his loot.

The one time I asked, he said, “They’ll never miss it.” He slapped his forehead in mock amazement. “You have no idea how many books and records this guy has.”

Maybe I was fifteen. The first album at issue was a Seraphim recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by Herbert Von Karajen conducting the Berlin Philharmoniker. The brown cardboard of the album cover was worn and frayed, so it must have been frequently handled. I thought the German spelling interesting, and I did not think hard about my father’s rationalization that the collector in the freshly painted apartment would hardly care. I still have the recording. The other recording he presented to me was a collection of arias sung by Maria Callas. At least I’d heard of Beethoven, but I was sure opera was awful. I still have that album, too.

Dad’s taste was not elevated: the albums had been randomly chosen. They were monaural at a time when our Magnavox fake walnut stereo cabinet featured a control knob for Volume and another for Balance, state of the art for stereophonic sound. Our family had begun to accrue vinyl records that had been specially made for that dawn of new acoustics, multiple track recordings. They were mostly big band music with absurd sound effects that popped and cracked and hurled sound from left to right like the ball in table tennis. Sound engineers could make that happen. Dad loved that stuff.

 “You never saw so many records,” he told me. “A whole bookcase of them; floor to ceiling. We spent half the day moving them so we could paint the shelves. When they are dry, tomorrow, we have to put the records back. How could they notice?”

Over a few years, in this way, I also obtained some hardcover books, often with dustcovers and a few in slipcases. Those might be illustrated; color plates were preserved under tissue paper. Most books were postwar classics. I remember Marjorie Morningstar and All the King’s Men. Unlike the records, they are long gone, but for all I know they were first editions. I still have a slender, numbered volume signed by Rebecca West. I believe the stolid outsized Atlas and Gazetteer that stood in our apartment’s built-in wall shelves came from the same source. The maps were colorful; the paper heavy.

Dad had no personal interest in these things. I am sure he could never have afforded to buy them; I am equally sure he acutely felt the gap between what he liked and what he was supposed to like. Though he lacked the financial means and personal passion to inject high culture into my young life, he stole it for me.

I wish I could write that I stole for my daughter, but that would not be true. I am not the Jean Valjean of the computer age. No one ever required a computer conversion plug to survive.

I also wish I could write this was the one and only time I shoplifted, but that would not be true, either. My crimes were always petty, pocketing an object I could afford, the money in my wallet.

It was about validation, the thrill of getting away with something. Everyone had so much; I had so little, and there were always hands in my pockets seeking to relieve me of what little I had. Braces for the kid? School clothes? Summer camp? Stealing was how I defied the circumstances that made me an itinerant professor and single parent. Morality is an abstraction. I was motivated by self-righteousness entitlement.

 Gaze, Universe, I steal with impunity, for I am destined to win.

In 2012, Perry Glasser was named a Fellow of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in Creative Nonfiction. Riverton Noir, a novel, won the Gival Press Novel Award in 2011. He has published three collections of short fiction, as well as a collection of short memoirs entitled Metamemoirs (2012). Glasser lives in Haverhill, Massachusetts where he drinks staggering amounts of coffee while working on a young adult novel.