It’s curious, isn’t it, how a small, unexpected event can trigger off old memories.
A couple of mine were triggered when I was standing in a busy mall one day. I saw a very young boy look across the crowded floor and begin to walk toward me. He had dark curly hair, chocolate pool eyes and one deep dimple.
I smiled as he got closer. He smiled back.
“Here,” he said. “This is for you.” And he handed me a tiny green vinyl snake, the kind, I think, one gets from those machines you put money into.
I looked down at it. “Thank you so much,” I said. “I promise you I’ll take care of him for the rest of my life.”
“Good,” said the boy child. He smiled up at me again, walked toward his mother and disappeared.
Driving home with that snake on the car seat next to me, I began to remember the snakes of my youth and the ones my sons and I kept as pets. (My husband “Mongo” tolerated but didn’t share our passions for herpetology.)
As a young girl, I was thrilled when I caught a snake. They felt so good sliding through my fingers, around my neck, cool, dry, satiny. I would keep them for a while and then let them go. I loved watching them slither quickly away, push through the ground cover into the bushes and then silently become the earth.
I remember one snake incident which I still regret deeply. I was around 10 and was standing in my front yard. It was very hot and I was trying to figure out how to sleaze out of pulling about a thousand acres of weeds my parents had insisted I do if I wanted to see another morn. My attention was diverted by a loud twittering of birds in a tree which grew against the corner of our home. I looked up and saw a huge Black snake stretched from the drainpipe to the branch of a tree, where he was munching contentedly on baby birds in a nest.
Enraged, I grabbed a rake and tore upstairs and charged into my parent’s bedroom (without knocking, absolutely unthinkable) and screamed at my father, ill in bed with the flu, that he had to hook that snake down. I threw the rake at him and surprisingly, he did as I requested, and got that snake, baby bird still stuck in its jaws, down onto the ground below. I grabbed the rake and raced downstairs, and in tears of fury, hooked the reptile from beneath the bushes, and beat that poor creature to death, although all he’d been doing was what snakes do when they’re hungry. My emotions had been definitely with the helpless baby birds that hot day, but I so wish I hadn’t killed that beautiful snake. I have never stopped regretting doing that. Yes I personally know that old memories of doing bad things can and do stay with one.
When our boys were growing up, we caught or purchased snakes together, and enjoyed keeping and learning about them. Watching them in their aquariums was about as thrilling as watching paint dry, but still, they were nice to hold and of course were always good for terrorizing neighborhood girls.
Feeding the snakes living things was something I avoided, leaving that nasty chore to the boys who took rather a more ghoulish pleasure in doing that than I cared to know about.
I’d get more than a little hysterical when the snakes would escape and I’d tear through our home screaming, “they’ll die in the walls and the smell will be horrible and it’ll stay forever and we’ll never, ever be able to sell the house, so FIND IT, FIND IT!!” They almost always did.
One snake, a beautiful little green thing, would always manage to escape from his aquarium and crawl straight to the nearest window and truly, would tie himself in a knot around the curtain rod. Really. Just like a big green shoelace. I could never untie that little beast, but the boys could with the help of a size 10 1/2 crochet hook. I never liked that snake anyway. He took far too much delight in biting my fingers and just not letting go.
Driving home that day from the mall with that plastic snake, I recalled how, when I was very young, an old family friend who used to travel the world to supply snakes to a local zoo would take me into their huge display “cages” at night when the zoo was closed, so I could help him jam dead rabbits into their craws with long poles. I only pretended to help. Mostly I hid. Even more mostly I threw up.
So, little boy in the mall whomever and wherever you are, thanks for the snake. He’s in a place in my home where I see him every day. I promise you I’ll treasure him always. And thanks for the memories.
LC Van Savage is a Brunswick resident.
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