When I was a kid I had a very precise fascination with small animals. It all started with sea monkeys. I remember my dad going to Fry’s Electronics often, although I can’t remember what he ever needed to go for. My family would split up and while my dad looked for whatever it was we went to Fry’s for, my little brothers and I would go wreak havoc on the toy aisle. One of the toys was the Amazing Live Sea Monkeys: The World’s Only Instant Pets.
I cannot eloquently enough explain the grip that those brine shrimp had on me, but I wanted them with every fiber of my being. I had never had a pet, but I knew I would be an excellent raiser of sea monkeys. I would beg him to let me buy the box that came with a watch that you could put the sea monkeys in to bring them with you everywhere you went. I wanted to hatch them and show my friends at school that I had leveled up from Nintendogs and gotten real-life pets.
Eventually, he let me get them, and I did hatch them. They didn’t actually do anything but float around, and there weren’t as many of them as I thought there would be, but I was very proud that I followed the directions and got my very own pets. I did attempt to put some of them in the clear watch tank, but it had a leak and the poor shrimp were lost somewhere on my walk to elementary school. The rest of the sea monkeys died when I tried to clean their little tank and my dad poured the glass I put them in down the sink.
I ended up setting my sights on a pet that was not nearly invisible to the naked eye.
During the summer, my family would go to the swap meet most Sundays. We would browse the tents, listen to whatever live classic rock cover band was playing, and my mom would let us get Slurpees. I received an allowance of $5 a week for vacuuming the house and had saved enough allowances to buy a turtle from a vendor at the swap meet who also sold little bamboo plants. I named him Pistachio, although I never did learn the gender of the turtle. It was very little and ate pellets that fogged up the water in its tank very quickly, smelling up my room so badly that it became a large point of contention in my household. My pet was stinky, but I loved him.
I only learned later that the turtle was likely very illegal to sell/buy/own, and it turns out that the same type of tiny turtles resulted in kids getting salmonella. I never got salmonella from him or from eating raw cookie dough (which I did very often as a kid), and the next time we went to the swap meet, the turtle seller was no longer a vendor. Pistachio stopped eating after about a month, and one day he closed his little eyes forever.
I came home to find his little corpse and the agony and grief my little 11-year-old self felt wracked my body for weeks. Today, at 25, I don’t think I would ever get another small pet like a turtle or hamster, but I have found myself researching sea monkeys.
Prattle Peach 