Stan’s Wonderful Secret Pets!

An 8 or 9-year old boy can always find a proper adventure. There was the spring morning when my brother, sister, and I, wrapped in our spring jackets, were running around in the yard in up-state New York. Stan called us to come see what he’d found in the basement window well. It was a whole huge tangle of squirming, baby garter snakes, maybe dozens of them!

How did we KNOW they were Garter Snakes? Of course, Patty and I questioned if they were not POISONOUS SNAKES! But, Stan assured us they were safe and they were only sweet little BABY Garter Snakes. And we accepted this because he was so much older and wiser and OF COURSE he KNEW these things!

“Oh Boy!” he exclaimed. “You two stay here and don’t let them get away!”

Patty and I looked at each other as he ran into the house. Obediently, we kept watch, although we touched nothing.

Quickly, he returned with a cardboard Dutch Masters cigar box and began to scoop up the tangled snakes into the box with his bare hands. Each snake was about 4-6 inches long. He held the box shut and we silently escorted him, as he bade us, up to his room. He carefully deposited the box in the top left drawer of his desk.

“Don’t tell Mother – or ANYONE!” he admonished us. “She won’t let us keep them if she knows!”

That must have been a Sunday, because the next day Patty and Stan were at school when Mother brought out her brand new Electrolux and began vacuuming the house. I was sprawled on the living room floor surrounded by scrap paper and crayons when she started up the stairs. One step at a time the vacuum roared its way up. She got to the landing, vacuumed around and then pulled the cedar chest from the wall to vacuum under it. That’s when she started her crazy “Mother Dance” … and song (okay, more of scream) with the vacuum wand wildly stabbing at the floor.

Wondering what was going on, I climbed the steps for a better view.

“A snake!” she gasped. “How did a snake get in the house – on the stairs?!”

“Only one?” I asked, as my focus wandered up the remaining stairs.

She turned off the vacuum cleaner and looked at me curiously. “What did you say? What do you know about this? What do you mean ‘only one?’”

“Nothing,” I lied. “He made me promise not to tell.”

It’s been decades since that dialogue, so I can’t offer it verbatim. But once she discovered there should be more than one, I was forced to take her to Stan’s room and tell the whole story of his wonderful secret discovery.

“Where are the rest of them?” she demanded.

“In a cigar box in his desk drawer,” I finally admitted.

With great trepidation, she crept into Stan’s bedroom. “Which drawer? Point to it,” she coaxed.

Following my little pudgy index finger, she mustered all her courage and slowly pulled open the drawer, quivering. She saw nothing odd. With a ruler, she popped open the cigar box lid to find it… completely… empty.

Her trembling voice asked, “How many were there?”

“I don’t know. It was full of them,” I offered.

Mother went down stairs and lit a cigarette. As far as I was concerned, the emergency was over. I went back to coloring. When Stan got home from school that day, he was an unhappy boy, partly because all his pets had escaped and Mother had vacuumed up at least one of them, but also because I had told on him and gotten him in trouble.

Mother told the story that for the next several weeks snakes were slithering out of closets and drawers, dropping out of ceiling fixtures in the basement, and who knows what else. They might have even dropped out of the ceiling during a Cub Scout Den meeting, which brings me to the story of the nudes…. (already published under Mother’s Foray into Scouting).