Susan’s Journal

Meet Rocky.

For a few years now, every time we go eat at this particular pizza place, the kids drag me by the hand next door into the pet shop. We wander through the puppies and the birdies and the… rats, and we always seem to end up in front of the turtle tanks. The kids walk away as I stay, mezmerized, watching the turtles with a piece of lettuce, chomp…. chomp…. chomping away, ever so slowly. One look at the price tags, though–between one and two hundred dollars–and I keep walking.

Enter stage left, a lady friend of mine from work. She was talking about this and that, and somehow turtles came into the conversation. She raises them and knows a lot about them. At the time of our conversation, she had two little baby ones.

“Any chance I could have one of those?”

…and before I knew it, she was bringing one into work in a opaque plastic ice cream container with knife holes poked in the top. He was a hundred times cuter than I thought he would be, and he’s only about twice the size of a quarter. I was lucky enough to snap this picture the first night we had him home; and as you can see, he’s pretty happy with his new home, because he’s smiling.

Dylan had him named before I brought him home–Rocky. Of course, Dylan had no idea who “Rocky” was, so I had to go on youTube (which seemed comical in itself) to find a video of Sylvester Stallone running through Philly. Dylan reaction was pretty much, yeah okay.

So meet Rocky. He lives in a ten gallon tank that Bud graciously bought us without asking, with little pebble rocks that he bought without asking, with turtle kibbles that he bought without asking. He also went down the street from his house to the creek bed to dig up three or four big, flat rocks for Rocky to rest on, basking in his heat lamp. There’s four inches of water in the tank, and a rock-pile-looking filter that cascades water through and keeps it clean; so now there’s a constant soothing waterfall sound in my house (though it verges on the edge of the sound of someone peeing).

This is one happy turtle. And I’ve got one happy Dylan.