My roommate and I kept a frog named Smooth Operator in our LXR double during my sophomore year. I had caught him in a stream back home during a frog search with my friend’s eight-year-old brother. He lived in a cage with shallow dirt, water and a couple of sticks.
We made weekly trips to PETCO in Cleveland Park to buy his feed—crickets. A bag of 24 costs about two dollars and a typical feeding was three crickets each day. If he looked especially hungry we would give him four.
Sam SweeneyThe real challenge was keeping the crickets alive. They fed on a quarter of a baked potato and lived in a Tupperware container with holes poked through the top. Dropping the potato slice into the container was tricky, as some crickets would jump up and escape before I could put the top back on. Plus, the smaller crickets wouldn’t always make it to the feeding because the big guys dominated the potato. Other times, many didn’t survive because we were too lazy to feed them.
My roommate released Smooth Operator near the Potomac during Christmas break. Our room smelled of dead crickets. I got tired of feeling like I needed to clean his cage. And I began to worry that loose crickets would crawl into my bed.
—Keenan Steiner (COL ’07)
I grew up in a Moscow apartment, so a pet was an unattainable luxury until my eighth birthday, when my parents finally caved in. The restrictions were that it could not be big, furry, messy or bothersome. That left few options and in the end I chose a budgie, a small parrot. I bought him along with a cage, bird food and specially formulated budgie vitamins. We bonded instantly. My dad was working abroad at the time, so I gave the budgie my dad’s first name—Maksik.
I came back from school two weeks after I had bought him. As I offered Maksik his customary greeting, he fell from his high perch and lay still. I tried calling for help, but he passed away within minutes. When my mother came home, I watched with trembling hands and tears in my eyes as she donned a pair of yellow gloves and laid Maksik to rest in a clear Ferrero Rocher box. We paid a local builder to bury him, though he probably just tossed him into the garbage pile.
—Anastasia Stepanova (COL ’09)
My pet turtle Rocky was named after the geological formation he resembled. He met an unexpected end the day my mother and I left him and his little aquarium on the back porch while we went to the store to stock up on crickets and lettuce for his masticatory pleasure. We hopped into the car with the happy knowledge that our dog Brandy, a wily puppy of Australian Heeler (and probably dingo) pedigree, would keep him company.
Upon our return, we found a shattered aquarium and our little reptilian comrade as dead as, well, a rock. In her efforts to engage Rocky in a game of catch, Brandy had unwittingly tossed her favorite knucklebone into the side of Rocky’s fragile home, sending shards of glass into his neck. I shot Brandy a scowling look. She replied with an innocent grin and a swish of the tail.
—Traviss Cassidy (SFS ’09)
My parents were never big on animals, so when I got a guinea pig for Christmas in third grade, I couldn’t have been more excited. But all of its four-legged, furry novelty soon wore off and Winnie (that’s what I named him, poor thing) fell into a life of neglect. Whenever my friend Therese would come over for a play date, the first thing she would ask me was, “Is Winnie dead yet?”
The one day she didn’t ask was the day we discovered him cold and lifeless on a bed of cedar chips. We had fun giving him a little funeral and then moved onto bigger and better activities. I don’t remember being particularly upset. I do, however, remember being completely inconsolable two years later when my little sister got a guinea pig for her birthday. I’m not sure if I was feeling guilty for the three years I barely sustained Winnie, or if I was just plain jealous, but I cried for hours.
—Katie Norton (COL ‘10)
