Chapter 13 (Animals I’ve Known and Loved, cont.)

Animal Burial Ground

Never being much of a small bird person, I wasn’t interested in my brother Peter’s parakeet. Perhaps it was my age as my interests were starting to turn towards boys. But his bird would fly about the house and perch on our fingers, but it was only Pete who made a pet out of it. It was given to him, cage and all, at Christmas time. I don’t know how long it lived or how many replaced it throughout the years as they never seemed to last too long.

I remember my mother purposely leaving a window open on purpose when Pete had an especially nasty parakeet--funny how when you want them to run away, they hesitate, but if you treasure the bird, the one time you leave the window open, out it goes, but that one that bit ears and chewed curtains finally, with encouragement, flew the coop sort of speak.

But one of Pete’s more beloved parakeets died about a week or two before I was going through the back entryway to our house, when I smelled something that reeked. The back entrance was the equivalent of a mud room in a modern house, and where we used to have the ice box… also where Mom used to milk the goats. Now, when anything was going to be disposed of that may smell up the house, we left it on the bench in the entryway until we had time to put it in the garbage or bury it. I noticed a small brown paper bag sitting alone with the top rolled down tightly. Fearing the germs of anything dead, and rather than accusing my little brother of not burying his parakeet, I gingerly plucked up the bag with thumb and forefinger; grabbed a shovel; and headed over the sand bank to the animal graveyard to bury Pet’s parakeet.

Having dug a shallow sandy grave, I threw the bag in, but somehow just couldn‘t cover it without having actually seen the corpse. I swallowed hard, for it smelled so bad, and didn’t want to be sickened by the sight, but I'd always wonder if I didn't check. So braced, I opened the bag. There was an inner wrapper of waxed paper. I had to reach in to loosen it. I held my nose, Hesitantly, I caught a corner and unrolled its contents--my father’s limburger cheese!

My father suffered many afflictions throughout his life, one of them being an ability to detect subtle tastes. This problem was a result of having inhaled some mustard gas during his tour of duty in France in WWI. Plus he was a chain smoker, which also compromised his ability to discern mild flavors, so he liked his cheeses with sharp flavors. Later on, when I was living on my own, I used buy those packages of small cheese samples that come in a round wheel, and are wrapped inside with foil… foil that keeps the smell from mingling with the other cheeses. Usually there would be a sample of limburger in the mix.

*[A note about my dad]
Dad was an inspiration for me. Always had arthritis as long as I could remember. Perhaps his early arthritis was caused from many broken bones throughout his life. When he was an infant, purchased milk was without the added vitamin D, so as a result he had rickets as a young child, leaving his bones brittle from not getting enough vitamin D from the sunshine. He also had operations on his eyes for cataracts in his forties, and about twenty years later his retinas in both eyes began tearing, and eventually this left him blind. He had to take an early retirement because of that, and took his blindness as a challenge, learning Braille so well he could have been an editor for the Braille books he received by mail. He also began having heart attacks in his 60s, almost dying several times, but ended up living six years longer than the doctors anticipated. He had a lot of problems, but never complained, and the same day he died, he had been swimming earlier with my Mom. He was almost 70 years old and lived a good life, never letting his infirmities get him down.