This is the introduction to my golden years, hearkening back to when I was a child.
I lived in an industrial district in Chicago, where on a clear day the sky was a hazy shade of copper. One Easter, in honor of resurrection, my mother bought me a duckling. I kept it in a box in the basement.
We had a small backyard, but that was where my grandmother tended to her Victory Garden, even though the War had been over for years. Nonetheless, she did not want my duckling eating her parsley, sage, rosemary or thyme. Onions, maybe.
I named the duck Dudley. We were inseparable. My grandmother thought us insufferable. Too much quacking and flapping, especially Dudley.
Dudley grew rapidly. Too rapidly. Each day, I dashed down to the basement, which had the bearing of Dante's First Circle -- dark, dingy, the residue of our old coal room wafting in the air. One morning, Dudley was gone. I looked everywhere, even in the coal room, where monsters lurked 'round the clock. No Dudley.
My mother and grandmother told me that, overnight, Dudley had escaped. My little chest exploded with grief. My first pet, my one quacking companion, was gone. I didn't stop to think that Dudley would have had to have flapped his wings, hovered in the air, unlocked the latch leading under the front porch with its beak, flown out, slamming the small door and latch back into place behind it, then drilling a hole in the porch latticework, replacing it, and flying past the airport and out of my life, somewhere over the rainbow.
Years later, my mother told me that Gramzee wanted the duck gone. Being a child of the Depression, she did not release the animal to hazy skies but seized on the practicality of giving away Dudley to my uncle, who ate it.
My uncle had eaten my pet duck.
And this was the beginning of my checkered past with pets.
