Saturday Morning Dissections

My first pet was a baby catfish that my dad and I found in the local creek. We took it home and put it in bowl filled with tap water and a little bit of grass and mud for it to feel at home. Neither of us knew that tap water wasn’t actually “freshwater,” so it died. We put it in a little box and had a pseudo-Orthodox funeral for it outside of our apartment while my mom stood back and shook her head.

After a suitable mourning period had passed, we got goldfish, and this time listened to everything the Wal-Mart pet department person said about dechlorinating water. But Wal-Mart goldfish aren’t built to last, so they died too, and we always went back to get replacements. The first deaths went down the toilet. After a few batches, my dad tried something different.

This time, he gingerly lifted the body out of the tank, laid it on a paper plate, and brought out plastic forks and knives (Mom wouldn’t let us use her kitchen utensils). Filled with the same wonder of discovery that drove the first surgeons to gather in a candlelit room to uncover the mysteries of life, my brother and I hunched over the plate while Dad cut into the creature, reverently sifting through the gooey mess to find the muscles, the stomach, the heart. This was what made a living creature, and this is what remains when it dies.

After the first few lessons, my dad let us take over the dissections. We loved our fish while they lived, and we explored the depths of their lives when they died. We stopped when my sister, too young when she joined our operating table to know that bodies should be honored, put a screwdriver into Comet’s eye to see what was inside. She had defiled the dissections, so we ended our practice. Oddly enough, she grew up to be the most scientific-minded of all of us.

I’m always self-conscious about sharing this part of my childhood. I worry that people will think I grew up in a demented household, where my father was teaching us to be serial killers or gravediggers who would desecrate human bodies. But he was simply a zoology major who didn’t know what to do with his degree except teach his kids something about the world. Each of us has grown up to be as normal as the next guy, just as insecure and mildly-accomplished-but-nothing-our-parents-really-want-to-brag-about as you would expect an American twenty-something to be. The only weird thing about us is that we actually enjoyed dissections in high school and college, so we made friends with both our squeamish lab partners, who really really didn’t want to touch that thing, and our science professors, who were just as weird as we were.

[469]

So, 2 Indians, a white guy, and 3 dogs go to a park…

During a walk with B, Brother and our dogs, I smelled barbecue, heard foreign voices, and saw brown skin. Trained by my mother to always be on the lookout for fellow Indians, I stretched my ears to pinpoint their ethnicity.

Not only were they Indian, they were Malayalee: they saw our dogs and shouted, “Patti!”

From “The Malayalee Alphabet” by Taarika John.

We kept going and ignoring them. They were strangers, after all. I looked over at Brother and said, “Remember when we were young and the Malayalee community seemed so small? People actually knew everyone else. I remember Mom giving a random Malayalee lady a ride home from Sack’N’Save just because she was Malayalee and needed a ride.”

B, usually quiet when my siblings and I start talking about childhood memories or being Indian, added, “Yeah, you’d never see us white people doing that. ‘Come with me, my white brother!’ would never happen.”

(147)

Dreams of Home

My parents were able to design our first house, and it became their baby, in every sense of the word. Mom was in a rare pink phase, picking pink bricks, pink backsplash, and pink faux-granite countertops for the place on Princess Street. Dad would take his camcorder to the property and record its progress while I soaked in the smells of sawdust and paint. Tucked away in our movie collection, you can still find his VHS titled “The American Dream.”

Maybe this is why I don’t like pink anymore.

For me, it was devouring my pile of library books while hanging upside down, running in circles in the yard with my dogs, watching the shadows of leaves dance on my eyelids in the summer sun—the life.

My sister. She was always cuter than me.

It was the one of the few reveries my parents and I shared. And even though we only lived there for five years, it’s the only home that exists in my dreams.

(150)

Daily Prompt: Our House