Archive for July, 2009

If we had schoolwork to attend to when we returned to our classrooms, it didn’t matter. Was he telling the factual truth? It doesn’t matter at this point. I think about this young man, in his jeans and his t-shirt, who stood for an hour, probably less, on the stage in our school cafeteria and mesmerized us with a story about a pet snake he had owned as a child. I’ve learned that storytellers used to paint images of story elements on their cave walls, to remind them of their place in the story…like post it notes. From those origins, where storytellers would chant and dance and share stories with an audience, we have evolved as a species to where we now articulate these stories with verbs and nouns and the occasional use of proper grammar. I sat there mesmerized, thousands of years of evolution culminating into such a short span of time. Who would think a good time would take so long to perfect? I wanted to be a part of that heritage one day. Then I found myself sitting in the grass with the rest of the class outside of the classroom about two weeks later.

Everyone was talking about the man with the snake story, and about the pets they owned. Most of the kids had goldfish, or dogs, or cats. There was this one boy, I’ll call him Soda Truck because that’s the nickname he gave himself in the classroom yearbook that was passed out at the end of the year. He really called himself Soda Truck, which I didn’t understand because I always saw him drinking milk. There were four of us, myself and three girls; Jessica, Lisa, and Selina. Selina lived in the same building I did. I liked Selina, and I had stayed quiet while the other girls told what pets they had. I was biding my time. Goldfish all around, which was exciting for me because I had a parakeet. I thought this would impress her. Soda Truck had been listening and looking over, and I had kept making eye contact with him, which I didn’t want to do. Just when I was about to jump in and say I had a parakeet, to which I expected to receive a reaction of awe, Soda cuts me off and starts talking about this chinchilla he has. He tells us about how it’s this little ball of fur with these huge eyes and this long and fluffy tail. The girls were eating this up, and I didn’t want to be outdone.

I told them I had a marsupial.

I’m pretty sure I had never seen a marsupial at that point in my life. It must have been a word I had heard one night while falling asleep with the television on. Yet there I sat with three girls and one guy in complete silence after I had revealed that I had a marsupial. I didn’t even know what one was, but I had all of their attention, including Selina’s.

I wasn’t completely sure what a marsupial was. I didn’t even know how many varieties there were of them at the time. From koalas, kangaroos, brushtail possums to the sugar glider, something that looks like a giant squirrel but with a smaller snout.  Lisa asked me what it was like, and I just started talking. I said it was about a little bigger than a cat. I had my arms stretched out to illustrate the size of the animal. My teacher gave me this odd look, but she was smiling, and she asked me if it had a pouch, because that’s what marsupials have to carry their  young in. I said it did. What’s its name, someone asked. Lord Jingles, I said back. And he definitely has a pouch, and sometimes my brother likes to hide things in it, so I have to keep him away from Lord Jingles. This went on for a few minutes until we went back inside and started to work on the math portion of the day’s lesson.

My brother Jorge and I sat in our room that afternoon while our Mom made us dinner. Jorge had been sick the last few days with a flu, and he had all of the windows closed because the light bothered him. Every time he had a flu or a cold or the chicken pox, the windows would be closed and I would have to turn on a small lamp to read anything in the afternoon. We sat there talking about my day at school, and I told him about Lord Jingles. When he asked me why I had done it, I told him, and he understood.

“Do you think anyone will ever figure it out?” he said.

I told him probably not. They would probably forget it in a few days. So the next day I went to school. It was a few minutes after I came back from recess that one of the security guards came to get me. My brother had been checked into the hospital at around nine that morning. They had to hold me down after that, and I cried in the corner of the room. I knew he had been sick, but I didn’t think he would have to go to the hospital. My Mom was sitting in the office when they brought me in with my eyes all red.

“Who is Lord Jingles?” she said to me.

Selina had been impressed when she thought I had a marsupial. She talked about it with her friends, and then her sisters, and then her sisters told their mother. Animal control had come by at eight thirty that morning. They informed our mother about reports of an illegal animal on the premises. They asked her to stand aside so they could check the house, and they started going through the house.  When they went into my room, my brother made a squeak, and the room was so dark because the curtains were down, and the guy from animal control must have been new at his job because my mom says he just jumped up and my brother jumped out of bed after that. And the guy shot him with one of the tranquilizer darts, right in the left buttocks . The tranquilizer wasn’t too strong, the man from animal control had come prepared to deal with something the size of a house cat. However, my brother always had health problems. He had an allergic reaction to the chemicals in the dart. They had to remove part of his buttocks in order to prevent infection from spreading.

My brother and I don’t talk very often these days. I tried to make it up to him. I gave him my bike, I cleaned his dishes for years. I even made a little pillow he could put to the side and sit on so he wouldn’t be lopsided when he sat at the dinner table.