If you’ve read this website before, you know that I have had a few interesting pets. My parents ran a rather “loose ship,” one might say.

We had the typical dogs and used them as watch dogs for our restaurant. We weren’t cat people. The local burglars feed them well and our dogs became quite close to them to our detriment, I might add. They are a fickle animal, at times. As with me, food is my drug of choice and those with it at hand are soon, my closest friends.

However, we did eventually end up with a dingo. That worked out fine for several years until she passed. She did not bark and was a fine companion. I don’t think the dingo ate her baby, by the way.

We moved to another house in Santa Ana and I ended up with a Rhesus macaque. We had built a large cage for some finches for my mother, but things somehow whet awry. Oh, those were interesting times.

One day my monkey got loose somehow and my mother made the mistake of letting him into the house. None of us ended up happy with that decision.

My monkey was chased through the house by my mother with a broom. He climbed the drapes with canned dog food in both hands and relieved himself a few times on the window sills. Who could blame him for that? However, that was a mistake on his part. But this is a story for another time. I’ve seen my brother do almost the same thing when my mother chased him with a broom.

He was a young specimen and well behaved, for the most part. He did wander off or escape a few times from his very large, nice, outdoor cage and stirred up the neighbor kids to some degree. My neighborhood looked like the village when Frankenstein visited as I arrived home when he escaped, one afternoon. The children had brooms, rakes and hoes and were in hot pursuit of him when I arrived home.

To catch “Monk,” all I had to do was bring out my lawn chair and sit down in it. When he saw me sitting there from his vantage point in a nearby tree, he climbed down in short order and came over to groom me. Those were the good old days. I do love a good grooming now and then.

Later, we had moved to another restaurant with a larger parcel of land and I decided that I needed a donkey. That story is here in my blog. That was an interesting pet interlude. They are not as quiet as you might think. They have a direct approach to most things and one cannot reason with them very much. They are like the Titanic. They are hard to get to change direction and usually it’s too late to do any good when they do. That was my experience, anyway.

This brings us to the “Blue Crawfish debacle.”

Somehow my wife and I ended up with an aquarium. We did the gold fish thing, but they proved to be as dirty as rumored and just a little more interesting than watching paint dry.

Somehow we decided on a Blue Crawfish as a pet that we had seen in the local pet store.

Pet stores will sell anything if given half a chance. I have stood too long there twice and had offers made on me that they gratefully accepted without my consent. I refused the offers both times. The last one wasn’t nearly enough or to my satisfaction for one reason or another. My wife thought she had received the best part of the first deal and was leaving without me and with three dollars when it fell through. I didn’t move out, after all. That left all three parties, disappointed.

That brings me back to the Blue Crawfish. They are an intelligent creature. They would often dance at the front of the aquarium when they saw my wife walk by. They loved her. I do as well. She fed them and cared for them as she does me. Perhaps even better.

They live for around five years at our place. They are a perfect pet as they can be eaten when their time has come.

However, not all Crawfish are made equal.

One of ours, the last one, I might ad, was a great escape artist. One morning after a slight remodel to the aquarium the night before, my wife woke to an empty aquarium.

She woke me up as she was about to leave for work. I slept in latter than she and was not interested in going for a crawfish hunt quite so early in the morning. My response did not please her.

So we spent the first part of the morning before going off to work searching our small place for a crawfish. That was fun. It’s just as well that we didn’t name it, I suppose. It didn’t seem to have any loyalty to either of us.

We didn’t find it of course, they are clever bugs. My wife left mad at me for some disparaging things I had said about her pet. I soon followed suit and left for work.

My wife called me during the day, of course, to remind me that I was a bad pet care person. I agreed whole heartedly and still do. That did not move things forward.

When I arrived home, before my wife I might add, I saw the crawfish snooping through our tax returns. They can be a bold and rude creature at times.

As I bent down to pick the little creature up, my cell phone rang. Yes, it was my wife reminding me how awful I had been to the crawfish. I mentioned that I was in hot pursuit of it now and asked to be freed from our conversation to catch the now slowly moving thing. She agreed and let me off the hook.

I picked up the crawfish or arthropod and placed it in a frying pan. No, I did no such thing. I placed it in a bowl and added enough water to keep it comfortable until its sweet keeper returned home.

I was reminded as I paced it in the bowl that it had free run of our place while we were sleeping. It is not a comforting thought. I can sometime still feel its tiny claws at my throat and cutting slowly around it and then climbing in for a look around for something to eat.

They are a strange animal and when they molt, you have two for the price of one until they finish eating their own exoskeleton.

We kept the exoskeleton from our first, like bronzed baby shoes. We put it in the refrigerator for safe keeping. That refrigerator broke down and we had to unload it so it could be returned. We missed our first’s exoskeleton, sadly.

I wonder what the guys at the repair shop thought about that when thy found it?

I have been told more than once that I am not a “pet person.” I disagree. I am simply a realest.

For a fun and informative audio interview of me by Brian, go to brian@briantellsstories.com from England.

It is titled, “Growing up with murderers.” Doesn’t that sound interesting?