My wife has had this turtle that I’ve mentioned elsewhere. Turtle’s have always been her favorite animal (are they animals?) and I don’t think I’ve ever really remembered her without her turtles. Even when she physically didn’t have a living turtle in her possession, she’d have someone taking care of it with the understanding that she could have him back at the drop of a hat. This has always been how it is, and sometimes it really bugs me. Her current turtle is George. Yeah yeah I know this guy has had like a billion names and I could probably list them all here and some are silly. But I won’t. My brother calls him George. So do I. And I know here we discovered George was a girl, but hey it’s my post, not hers. Anyway, so George now lives in the guest room, and I typically don’t go in there. We were in there the other night cleaning the damn tank. Yuck. It needed it. So we cleaned it until about midnight Sunday. And my job is to turn on and off the lights while my wife is gone and to feed him.

Well, last night was very long and I came home, crashed, and woke up (thank God no one called). I went in to get something off my network printer, and I admired how nicely clean the water is. And I looked at all the goldfish swimming in circles, oblivious to the fact that they are, in fact, dinner. And then I did NOT see the turtle. Crap! I wasn’t too thrilled. Oh no, I thought. My wife’ll kill me. She’s going to think I killed her turtle or something like that. I slowly walked out of the room and closed the door behind me. I then found on eof my maglites, walked back into the room, and closed myself in. I began systematically moving items here and there, searching every inch of the room for George. I wandered how long she’d been out, and if she could live without water, and how long, and what dead turtle smelled like. There was no water anywhere on the dresser or floor, so I really didn’t know how long ago it was.

Finally, after searching every nook and crannie in half the room, I flipped up the bedspread. There, looking at me, smiling, was GEORGE! He was dry as a bone, but happy happy. He asked me "what took you so long? I need a drink!"

Me too, George. Me too.