The Armadillo

Good evening,

One of the best, funniest, grossest, least and most entertaining things that Texas has thrown at me is my armadillo. There are those that have already heard versions of this story, but I felt it necessary to get the unedited version out there.

Early on after moving in to our new house I began to have a little game going of "What weird thing will be floating in our pool today?" They say everything is bigger in Texas and whereas I cannot comment on "everything" the bugs sure as hell are bigger, and a whole lot meaner. Within the first few days there was a giant cicada, giant grasshopper, giant frog, giant beetles, giant stinging winged insects, you get the picture. The boys found endless entertainment in having me scoop these things out and put them in an empty egg crate for their "bug collection". Not the frog though, it spent a while too long underwater and came up in pieces...ugh.

One innocent morning as I was conversing with the woman who so graciously gave me life on the phone I noticed something rather large in the pool. Matt routinely walks out there with his deck shoes on. Deck shoes comes from the Adidas sandals that I used to wear on the pool deck during my diving days. They're made to be soaking wet. Anyway, he always wore them out there and rarely, if ever, wore them back into the house. Usually they wound up joining the rings, torpedoes, squirt guns, and other assorted pool toys floating aimlessly until the afternoon for the boys to pick them up. However, rather than being black, like his sandals, this shoe was brown. Again no cause for alarm, it couldn't be less shocking for me to imagine Matt wearing other shoes out there and forgetting about them as soon as he saw something shiny and got too distracted to realize he was barefoot.

As our conversation lulled I said to my mother that one of Matt's brown slip on shoes was in the water. I saw no need to hang up the phone, just walked outside and picked up the net to scoop the shoe out and go about my day. I, still talking to mom, began walking around the edge of the pool and something about this shoe's appearance became very odd. It wasn't the right color, and it was much too big. At this point, I began to panic. What was it? Just what the hell was it!? I approached, and let my mother know that this was definitely NOT a shoe. The conversation went something like this.

"Huh, that isn't a shoe. What the hell is that?"

She replied "What do you mean it's not a shoe, what else could it be?"

The horror took over as a realized I was staring at what was, until recently, an armadillo.

"Oh my GOD! It's a fucking armadillo! There's a dead freaking armadillo floating in my effing pool!" Yes, I use many different ways to express the lovely f-bomb.

Thinking there would be an outpouring of concern, love, and support was completely wrong. I have never heard my mother laugh so loudly. Ever. And I've seen this woman after too many margaritas when her face goes numb. I was in the same hospital room she was when dad played Garth's infamous "There's a duck in your house, and it's not my fault" voicemail. I sat at the same table in Hawaii when my little brother dropped 4 ounces of liquid aloe vera on my father's bald spot, and that event caused Mt. Dew to come rocketing out of my nose. She was there when Grant hit Garth in the head with a squish ball at a distance of 30 yards from a floating raft. She was there when Grant wound up to hit a funoodle around the ladder of that same raft and managed to hit himself in the nards so hard that he may very well have rendered himself infertile.

On a side note, I never realized how many hilarious moments my little brother has provided. Thank you Grant. Keep up the good work.

No, this incident took the cake without a doubt. She roared, howled with laughter. Unquestionably she had tears streaming from her eyes and her stomach ached for at least two days. Honestly, she's probably chuckling about it right now from the safety of her snow covered home in the great white north.

What to do about my new, deceased, friend? What else but continue the job at hand. I scooped the curled carcass out of the pool, and was surprised at how light it was, perhaps 4 or 5 pounds. Naturally, I had to hang up to complete the recovery mission. Once in the net the next logical step seemed to dispose of it down by the creek, again we're big on returning things to nature around here. Cringing the whole way down with this dead thing hanging in the bright blue net at the end of a 10 foot pole I wondered if it was true what they said about armadillos and leprosy. Really I figured that would be about par for the course. Come to Texas, see a tarantula, die of leprosy. The trifecta.

I left the poor little guy there and ran, not walked, back to the house where I again threw the deadbolt just in case. About an hour later I had a horrifying thought. In all my panicked, confused haste I had forgotten to snap a picture of my new late buddy for proper Facebook documentation. The children were still sound asleep for their naps and I put on my pink cowboy boots and trudged down to get my evidence. No dice.

It was gone. The dead damn armadillo was GONE! I double checked that I walked to the right place. Yep, there was the net that I dropped on my sprint back indoors, there were the footprints I left in my wake. No armadillo. I called Matt to give him the terrible update so he could share my shock at bigger animals living in our backyard that will eat dead 5 pound animals. To my chagrin, he could not have been less surprised or concerned. In fact, he rattled off a list of things that would be more than happy to feast on the free lunch I left out. Raccoons, Coyotes, Bobcats, Possums, Fox...with each one I grew more and more convinced that those very animals were having a planning session in the woods to decide exactly when to invade.

I was left with only questions at that point. What caused that poor little armadillo to commit suicide by crawling up the ramp to our pool and fall in? What happened in the animal kingdom that left him so despondent? Wasn't there anything that could have offered him comfort, solace, or hope? Truly sad. And of course, what about the leprosy issue? Yes there was at least one aspect of the disease that sounded alright, the leper colony on Kua'i sounds positively divine. But the rest, eh, I could do without it. Thankfully after an exhaustive Google search I discovered that while it is in fact possible to contract leprosy from an armadillo the only known way is by consuming raw or undercooked meat. Considering the chances of my eating armadillo in any form is significantly less than zero I felt completely at ease.

Let's be honest, when considering the long, LONG list of foods that I have yet to try in my 29 years of eating solid foods, armadillo meat just can't crack the top 1,000. Maybe start small with something like a tomato, cucumber, pickle, cauliflower, radish, sweet potato, eggnog, strawberry malt, cherry, olive, lamb, tuna, octopus, calamari, squirrel, tangerine, brazil nut, mushroom, bell pepper, kiwi...you get the idea.