I was a petless kid.
When I was seven, I asked my babysitter, Barbara, to take me down to the front garden to dig for ants. I scooped a few clumps of ant-rich soil into an old jam jar and screwed the lid on. I put the jar on my window sill and waited to feel like a pet owner.
POSSESSION BY AMANDA KLARSFELD 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 127
I was a petless kid and I did what I could to fill the void. When I was seven, I asked my babysitter, Barbara, to take me down to the front garden to dig for ants. I scooped a few clumps of ant-rich soil into an old jam jar and screwed the lid on. I put the jar on my window sill and waited to feel like a pet owner.
But try as I did, I could not bring myself to consider the ants pets. I could not touch them. Unscrewing the lid was not an option. Even at seven I knew this would lead to irreversible disaster.
Also the ants were not cute. I talked to them in the kind of baby voice people use for pets–“Hewwo wittle anties!”–but this didn’t feel right. The ants lived out their few remaining days foodless, waterless, and ignored until all life in the jam jar came to an inevitable and unlamented halt.
The creation of a death chamber had not been my plan, nor was I one of those depraved kids who derives pleasure from seeing animals suffer. Still, this would not be the last time that I brought a creature home to die.
At eight I attended a day camp in the Bronx, and I put a ladybug that was crawling on me in my thermos and took it home. I put the ladybug in an empty mustard jar with a piece of romaine lettuce. This time I poked air holes in the lid, and gave the ladybug a name, which I hadn’t done with the ants. I called it Nermal after the tabby cat from the Garfield comic strip, who was Garfield’s nemesis.
I wrote to my sister, Stephanie, at sleep-away camp and told her about my new pet. I felt that by giving her tidbits of the excitement back at home, she’d feel she was missing out and want to return. Unfortunately, Nermal died after two days. In my next letter I broke the bad news.