The first time I saw Bambi I bawled my eyes out. This, I think, is universal, regardless of where you were born or where you grew up. Bambi’s mom dying was one of the early traumas in my childhood. But Bambi also has another iconic scene that has stayed with me for the last 30 years: the one where two skunks with sultry eyelashes fall in love (remember when the girl skunk is making bedroom eyes at Flower from inside of a bush?). My conclusions were that skunks are fluffy and adorable, capable of blushing and falling in love.
Growing up in Yerevan, a city of one million residents, the only kinds of wildlife I was familiar with were stray cats and dogs, and maybe pigeons. I had a love thing with stray dogs – I was the stray dog whisperer. I’d feed them my school lunches, brush the dirt and mats out of their coats, remove ticks. Some mornings I’d have a battalion of 3-4 strays walking me to school. I really wanted to have a dog, but my parents were unrelenting.
I did however end up with a cat. I had to pass this dumpster on my way to school, and one day I saw a box of tiny kittens meowing up a storm in it – someone’s cat had kittens, and they decided to throw away the entire litter. The kittens couldn’t have been more than a day or two old. They were tiny loud balls of fur with their eyes not quite open yet. On my way home from school only one fur ball was left – the neighborhood kids said that stray dogs had gotten to the rest. I figured the last kitten had managed to survive for a reason, so I took him home.
This guy was tiny. He kept shivering and was too small to eat even out of a baby bottle. I wrapped him up in a t-shirt, nestled him behind some books on my bookshelf, in case my parents hear him hollering and come into my room, and dashed to the pharmacy to buy pipettes – that was how I would feed him for the next two weeks. We stuck to a pretty rigorous feeding schedule, of which I would be notified by meowing at all hours of day and night.
I thought I was doing an excellent job hiding the kitten (who I had decided to name Sergey after a boy at school that I was hopelessly crushing on – isn’t this how you express your unrequited teenage love?) from my parents. Until one night I woke up at 3 am because the light in my room was on and saw my mom pipetting milk to feed the kitten. I’d somehow slept through the meowing that had woken her up, but when she established where the noise was coming from, she leapt into action. If frustration had a face, it would have been my mom, in her nightgown buttoned crooked, her usually tidy hair all over the place, one eye not quite open, holding a tiny yelling kitten that she absolutely did not authorize in her house (my mom is the kind of woman that has things under control – this wasn’t one of those things). It was 3 am and she was having to deal with a hungry kitten.
In the morning my mom demanded to know how the cat ended up in the house, and when I told her the story, the kitten was allowed to stay until he could fend for himself. Then he had to go. But days stretched into weeks, my mom and I started taking turns on nighttime kitten feedings, and the cat ended up purring his way into my mom’s heart and into our house. The only thing was, my mom was absolutely not down with Sergey. But it was a small concession to make – I now had a cat named Poushok (Fluffy, which, really, in an improvement on Sergey – there is only so much you can ask for).
By contrast, when I first moved to the US and saw the abundance of critters everywhere, I was overwhelmed. There were no strays. But there were squirrels, chipmunks, racoons. And skunks, just like in Bambi: fluffy and adorable. Except that I got a stern talking to from my roommate Rachel – I was not to try and pet the skunks, not even if they made bedroom eyes at me from the bushes. But Rachel hadn’t warned me about squirrels.
One day I was walking on campus when I saw a really pretty squirrel on a low branch on a tree. I looked at it, and I could have sworn it had looked back at me, made eye contact, and smiled. For what it’s worth, at that point, all my wildlife references had come from cartoons where little birds helped princesses get dressed – a squirrel smiling at me made perfect sense. So I went up to this squirrel to make a better acquaintance. He did not leave his branch and just sat there “smiling.” Since we seemed to be getting along swimmingly, I figured I’d pet him – cartoon squirrels always seemed on board. And so did this one! It chattered when I pet him and then migrated up my arm and onto my shoulder. This wasn’t really the turn of events I was anticipating. When I tried to pick him up to relocate him from my shoulder, the squirrel appeared to take exception to it, and bolted into my hair. At this point in my life I had hair down to my waist, and the squirrel proceeded to get hopelessly tangled in it (when you have squirrels tangled in your hair, you know you need a haircut). When I finally did get a hold of him, he chomped on my hand and would not let go, at which point my hand started bleeding profusely.
I really wish there was some sort of closure to the story. But really, it ended with the squirrel finally letting go of my hand, and me holding this incident against all squirrels thereafter (I just don’t like them, what can I say?). Oh, and I probably should have gotten rabies shots at that point but I didn’t. I wonder if rabies shots were prerequisites for the Disney princesses who were all chummy with forest critters?
Packing List for Immigration 