HERE’S SOMETHING FROM A PREVIOUS BLOG WHICH I LIBERATED AND POSTED HERE FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT. HAPPY FRIDAY!

I was a very young kid when my much-older cousin Adam came back from the war in Vietnam. He had a Silver Star and all kinds of fascinating half-stories about mysterious bath houses where women were paid dollar bills to walk on your back in their bare feet which my scandalized grandmother–who didn’t even like it when you played cards in her house because of possible sinning while gambling–didn’t like. I say half-stories because that’s about all my sister and I were able to hear before my grandmother hushed him up.

One day after his return, Adam came by with what he said was a “gift” for my grandfather. Later, I learned that–aside from the normal kind of present which comes wrapped and is always welcome among civilized persons–receiving a gift from your grandson who is still not quite the same person after Vietnam can also mean that he needs to park his squirrel monkey at your house for awhile. The same squirrel monkey that seemed so cute and a really, really good idea to buy at the time but which now makes an unholy mess and mostly just smells off. Oh yes–and he bites when you pick him up. 

“Happy Birthday, Pops! His name is Hambone.  Say, where do you keep your band-aids?”

My sister and I loved visiting our grandparents, but they just had one television which was frequently tuned to the news or Lawrence Welk and most forms of entertainment were exhausted pretty quickly there, so you can imagine the unbridled excitement we felt over the prospect of a monkey playmate right there in the house. Our baby sister was no longer a baby and not as easily given over to our risky entertainment ideas, so Hambone represented the promise of a unique and possibly more cooperative playmate. However, our dreams of dressing Hambone in baby clothes and cunning hats, carrying him on our shoulders or teaching him to eat with a fork were dashed when we realized that Hambone was going to be the kind of pet you mostly just looked at due to his predilection for grabbing your nearest appendage–usually a finger– with his tiny monkey hands and sinking his needle-like teeth into them.

Sure, it was entertaining to watch him eat with his fascinatingly nimble fingers or imagine what he was thinking as he watched us with his glittery black eyes. His expressions were inscrutable which made it tempting to put small items close enough to the chicken wire in the hopes that he would take whatever it was and turn it over and study it the way a human would do. Things got really exciting when it was time to clean out his cage because Hambone had to be removed so that fresh shavings and newspaper could be spread on the bottom of the cage and the old poopy liner carried out –and then promptly burned. This required the use of heavy falconer’s gloves for the person holding him. If all went well, he would sit quietly on the curtain rod above the kitchen window and not choose that particular moment to release the contents of his digestive tract nor resist the fevered attempts to put him back into what must have been his own personal Hanoi Hilton when the time came.

Both my grandparents were scrupulously clean people, but my grandmother was more vocal about her simmering hatred for Hambone and–truth be told–his entertainment value didn’t play out nearly as well as we children had thought. Also? There was the smell. I won’t camp too long on the description, but if you can imagine a baby’s fully loaded diaper dipped in a mixture of hot mayonnaise and old celery, you’ll have an idea of what an assault the monkey’s presence had become when it came to our olfactory sensibilities. Sorry for over sharing. The standard for cleanliness was also at stake and people were running out of fingers. This whole enterprise–we came to understand–wasn’t going to end well.

One day we came to visit our grandparents and Hambone was no longer in residence. In our absence he had been so completely vacated from the premises that even the faintest whiff of his sour essence couldn’t be detected. The white enameled table which normally held his rustic abode now featured a clean tea towel and a non-ironic bowl of bananas that had zero connection to the departed guest. Hambone’s appearance and subsequent vanishing was then and remains an unsolved mystery.

There were vague and unsatisfactory explanations about where Hambone had gotten to and I’m almost positive that no foul play was involved. Almost. But where exactly had he gone? Perhaps he ran off to join a local circus where strong odors were less problematic? Maybe Hambone had enrolled in a trade school where he found fulfilling work opening jars and fetching the tv remote for an elderly roommate? I preferred to think he found his way to a monkey sanctuary and found love with another consenting primate and retains no memories of his prior incarceration. One can hope.