poncho

reading my friend's blog, i was reminded about some pets my family used to have.
one pet's name was poncho. he was an iguana. he drowned in the bathtub. my mom [unsuccessfully] gave him mouth to mouth.

i don't remember if i cried. i probably did. but i was also the only one who cried (i think...) when the weiner dog ramsey bled to death out of every hole in his body after eating the rat poison dangerously planted behind the deep freezer in the basement. in retrospect this is a good memory, not because my dog died (even though he did bite me on several occassions and made me dump a whole fucking bowl of hot oatmeal in my lap. but that's neither here nor there) but because it's a very vivid reminder of a good time and place in my life when everything was better than just okay, good even (everything, except of course my dog bleeding to death). just another oddly-colored event in the history of my house on union street. i miss that house. in the backyard there's a veritable pet cemetary, final resting place to most of the animals my mom brought home from the vet clinic that we adopted. but then there was lobo, the alaskan malamute who used to pull us up the hill on our sled, who died of the cancer during the winter. the ground was too hard to bury him, so we had him cremated instead.

that's all about my pets. don't even get me started on bahb, the pitbull whose framed picture currently sits on top of my tv here in the korea.