Turtle

I love turtles. I remember having a baby snapping turtle as a pet, it was as tiny as one of those green sliders sold in pet stores and it never got any bigger, having died. My older brother gave it to me, caught in a creek. No, no, he didn’t give it to me, he held a raffle, that’s right. He held a fair. It was the suburbs, kids did this sort of thing back then. We weren’t as supervised. The fair consisted of selling lemonade and cookies and turning the garage into a spook house and there was a raffle for a baby snapping turtle he caught in the creek a couple of towns over. My brother told me he fixed the raffle so I would win the turtle. I didn’t like the corruption, I guess it was a life lesson. What a cute reptile, black and those snappers, had a lot of energy, they can’t go back into their shell like other terrapin. I remember feeding it tiny bits of raw hamburger meat, dropping them into the little plastic bowl. The turtle didn’t last too long. A few years later, I had a box turtle I named Tank, who died in the winter. I kept him in the basement in this kiddy pool, I made a home for him there. I didn’t have a heat source and the poor guy just died. Don’t believe those Rocky movies, turtles are hard pets to keep. One of the first books I remember is Timothy Turtle. Not many books had my name in the title. I was a little young for The Epistles. Creatures would climb on his back and he ferried them across the river. I just like turtles, I’ve been known to go to rivers and such and watch turtles. It was a favorite activity with Nancy down in Virginia. We would watch them, mainly painters and muds, although a few green sliders were seen. It was at this park in Newport News, a kind of inlet from the James River and one of the rangers told me it was getting to be a problem, the green turtles were let go by former owners and were starting to become an invasive species. I saw this guy in Central Park the other day. I love the way turtles move, how they swim underneath the surface of the water with only their snouts sticking through, like a snorkel. Central Park ponds have a sizeable and healthy turtle population and it’s their season now. Go some time when it’s hot and sunny and watch them languish on the rocks and logs. Watching turtles gives me, albeit fleeting, a sense of peace and happiness. I love their perseverance, their ability to persevere even though they are perpetually alone, eternally within their shell. I saw a photograph that morning in the Times, the BP oil spill in the Gulf, a green sea turtle turned petroleum black. This guys safe in Central Park, ready for another summer of soaking up the rays of the sun, eating and mating.