BillSiggelkow.com

Once upon a time I wrote a book. It was hard work, it was frustrating, it was fun, and it was rewarding. Since then I have done very little writing. Now is the time for that to change.

I slept in a bit today. The warm shower and the hot coffee called to me “You need us, you need us!”, and I did. Before embarking on my morning ritual of becoming lucid, I said to my son, “Good morning, son!” He’s eight. There are times when raising a child that they say the simplest little things that make you love them so much. All my son said to me was “Okay. I am going to feed all the animals, Dad.” That might not sound like a big thing, but we have a lot of animals.

There’s the 8-year old dog, Precious. Born roughly 3 months before the eight-year old son. Sweet, but a bit of a pain. She seems to enjoy the things that irritate us—incessantly chewing on her backside, and barking up a storm after she was let outside a minute before. Then there’s stealing your lunch as it sits on unguarded, and, of course, laying on the couch. With the latter she very consistently favors the love seat, deftly tossing off the throw pillows. She seems to know that they are throw pillows.

There are the two black cats, Pepper and Gulliver. Both sweet and both, well, annoying in their own special ways. Pepper, a.k.a. the “fat cat”, enjoys meowing and meowing until he’s fed. Two minutes later, the meowing begins again. Gulliver, on the other hand is much less vocal than his so-called brother. He makes up for this by annoying us in other ways—hiding in places that we still have no idea of where they are, and tossing up the occasional hair-ball. But, the one thing about Gulliver that sets him apart from the rest of the entire family, humanoids included, is that he has been with me for somewhere around 16 years. Long before I even had a family.

So we’ve got the dog and the two cats—now onto the more interesting critters. My son’s favorite pet, Crush, is a 3-year old Russian Tortoise. A tortoise, mind you, not a turtle. But it seems like he’s always being referred to as such. Whenever he hears “feed the turtle” he thinks to himself, “Stupid humans, I am going to start calling them ‘gorillas’!” When it comes to maintenance, Crush is the best of the bunch. Lettuce in the morning, a change of water every week, and a change of bedding every few months. If only all the other members of the household were so easy to care for! But, sad to say, we “stupid humans” still tend to neglect this poor creature. We let him walk around outside of his dry aquarium far too infrequently.

Okay, so we’re up to 4 animals—10 to go! The last 10 are actually the newest addition to the family. They’re all tropical fish, and they appear to be quite hardy considering we tend to neglect them as well.

So when my son said “I’ll feed all the animals” it was no small task. And the thought that he wanted to do this warmed my heart.