Oh, let me think... my first pet was a little russet-and-white mutt called Rusty Mack, who got run over by a semi right in front of me when I was five.
After that my sister and I had a pair of dark mutt puppies from a neighbor called Mustard and Whistlepig who disappeared mysteriously. After that, My mother rescued a beautiful black lab who'd been run over by a sports-car, nursed her back to health, and called her Coffin (actually, she first named her Black Magic but decided that was Satanic, then renamed her Coffee, but eventually corrupted it to Coffin... which was creepy and fun for a black dog with a white cross on its chest). Coffin was a smart and resourceful dog, she lived to be fifteen before she was poisoned during a malathion saturation in the great fruit-fly epidemic of '81.
Before that happened, we'd picked up a very pretty sheltie at a roadside stand on one of our road-trips, and my sister called her Chips after the TV show. When Chips got knocked up by every dog in the neighborhood and delivered eleven puppies that didn't look remotely alike, I got to keep one for my very own, a little white puppy with a black patch over one eye who I called Alexander; he died of food-poisoning a few months later (mother fed the dogs some left-over omelettes from a brunch buffet, and three of them died). Chips lived to a ripe old age, until she got run over trying to cross a highway after Mother moved up to Jamestown.
Mother also had various mottled cats, all of whom were called Calico for obvious reasons; one of them scratched me and infected me with tuberculosis, causing me to have a lymph node surgically removed from under my chin and leaving a nasty scar. I've loathed cats ever since.
When my father married my stepmother, along with two step-sisters I suddenly found myself related to a huge and remarkably stupid golden lab called Trippin and a tiny gray cockapoo called Fluffy; they both died at fairly old ages, sometime or other in the 70s. Later on, my stepmother's mother started raising Chinese shar-peis, smelly ill-tempered brutes, and we had two litter-runts called Chubby and Dim-Sum. God, I loathed those dogs! She had them for a good fifteen years each before they took their places in doggie hell.
In my teenage years, after I moved in with Grandmother, my sister and I bought a parakeet for our Grandfather, who had ceased talking by then... quite to our surprise, he was actually moved to speak, naming the bird Moe. But poor Moe died of starvation after Grandmother went on a trip; I was left in charge of feeding Moe while she was gone, and did so faithfully, but when she returned she thought I was still feeding him while I naturally assumed she had resumed feeding him, and the poor thing dropped off his perch after a couple of weeks. As an adult, I had a finch who I also named Alexander and also starved to death after I forgot he was there... I'd gotten so used to his chirping that I didn't even notice him anymore.
After my Grandfather died, my uncle gave Grandmother a lhasa-apso puppy from his dog Tippy's litter; Grandmother named her Maggie. She was a cute little thing, but yapped almost incessantly. When she was seven, she went blind for no apparent reason. About a year later, she fell off a balcony at my uncle's house, she'd followed Tippy upstairs and couldn't find the way back down, so she just followed the voices through the railing and fell, breaking her back on a planter. Grandmother decided to have her put down rather than have to live paralyzed and blind.
That was almost eight years ago, and we haven't had any pets since then, until I bought these two turtles in Chinatown five months ago. I named them Claudius and Agrippa. Agrippa died after six or seven weeks, but Claudius is thriving. I have great hopes for his survival, though he's not a very cuddly pet... in fact, he always hides under his rock when he sees me.
