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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (38287)	9/20/1999 11:33:00 AM
From: Gauguin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

That is like a Miracle Frog. With their skin, that must be like floating in acid. Dash had a California desert tortoise for years. Someone (stupidly) brought the tiled basketball home from the desert, and he lived in their Altadena back yard for years. Dash's mom's most treasured asset, truly, was the dichondra in the back yard. (Non-Californians may not know what it is, or how hard it is to grow and keep a super-nice patch, but it's an elegant ground cover.) They had two huge patches on either side of the pool. It's cool stuff under bare feet. We weren't allowed to do cannonballs in the pool, because the water would fly out of there and kill the dichondra, which really pissed her off. Yah. That was not taken as "funny." But there'd be these yellow patches where the top leaves were stripped off ~ and it was the tortoise. He'd come out of the rockeries and really liked that stuff. It made her mad as hell to see that damn tortoise out there, like a strip miner, tearing the tops off the dichondra and munching them down and leaving her those pathetic anti-social life blemishes. Just wouldn't do, to have crappy dichondra. It was important. Among your plant kingdom, this stuff had risen to higher importance than human life. So it was our job not only to not do cannonballs, but to detach that hoodlum immediately if we saw him in the grass and put him back in the raised rock bed. Sure he was unique, but so are most parasites. Like Dash and his brother, for that matter. He (both - all three) would sort of hibernate for the winter, or at odd periods, and no one would see his big hump bump for months, We'd always think he was dead, but he'd always show up. We thought it was a happy day when we spotted him out the sliding glass doors, but Auntie usually marked the appearance with a "That goddam tortoise is eating my dichondra again. Go out and move the tortoise." That has to be one of the odder maternal commands ever issued. "Go out and move the tortoise." "Go out and put the tortoise away," was another. I forget his name, if he had one; "Lightning" or something. Sometimes he would really get moving, with some kind of tortoise agenda. A goal place to go. And then he would elevate, like a hydrofoil, and up on the legs and we're movin. Flip those long arms out in front, one at a time gravity is our only enemy, and get the back legs goin and even the tail a-wiggle. If you're a tortoise, it's really true that the shortest distance between two points is a line. You can tell, where they're going. They're more of a bee-line than bees. And of course, teenagers couldn't resist putting him across the yard from wherever he was headed. Anti-Determinism. Or putting him on his back, to show people they really can flip back over by themselves. It takes half an hour, but they can do it. But really, sincere effort was made to minimize tortoise terror and leave the little dude be. So mostly we left him alone, except to give to the naive, because he would pee on them. I don't know why that's funny, but hey. Everybody did it, including Auntie. One day she went out to the kidney-shaped topaz pool, and there was old Mr Tortoise, on the bottom. He'd been living there fifteen years or so, and finally fell in that sucker. Always within twenty feet of it; and finally he went too damn fast and reckless and bee-line, and bought it. You have to figure drowning is not a very common desert tortoise fate. Maybe it's like the doorway to Nirvana. Totoise Valhalla. Or maybe not. Hard to say. Wouldn't want to speculate. You know me! I don't indulge in that speculation stuff.