You know that story (or rather, it's a "moral") about the frog that's in a pot of water when it's cold and when you heat up the water gradually, the frog never realizes the difference and is boiled to death? Well, this isn't one of those stories. Here, I'll start at the beginning:
I've been home (home being the house where I spent my entire childhood until I left for college) for a couple days now. My two brothers and my two sisters and I came together to be with my father while he's been very ill. We've done a lot of sitting around and talking together.
Amidst all the conferring, a little piece of truth came out yesterday, much to my horror. It was about my frog. It was a little African clawed frog I bought from the pet store when I was in high school. His name was Oscar. I probably paid a couple bucks for him. You've probably seen one of these frogs yourself; it was a swimming frog you see a lot in with the fish. They just swim back and forth in the tank and if you buy one, they usually die in the first week or two. Well, I got the exceptional frog.
He lived so long and grew so big that he shocked everyone, including me. I moved out of the house to leave for college and my parents kept Oscar and fed him and took care of him. My dad was so attached to him. He would stick a little net into the fish tank and Oscar would float up to the top and my dad would scratch his back and his tummy with the net. It was really quite amazing. And they cleaned out his tank once a week.
On Oscar's last living day, my parents were cleaning out his tank. They usually filled up the sink with water, put Oscar in while they cleaned the tank, then transferred him back to his fresh and recently cleaned tank. This particular time, the sink was inadvertantly filled with steaming, boiling hot water. My mom said when they put Oscar into the sink, he hopped up a bit. A little different from normal, but my mom didn't think anything of it. She went over to clean the tank. When she came back to get Oscar, he was belly up. Completely boiled.
They never told me the truth. They said he died of old age, which I totally believed because he really had lived nearly six or seven years. My sister let it slip.
I then asked my mom what really happened to my childhood pet, my bunny rabbit Butterscotch. Had he really gone to that happy farm where they needed a rabbit? No, it turns out they had given him to a family friend who butchered him and ate him.
I wonder what else I'll learn in the next several weeks . . .
