Menagerie

I once worked with a family who lived in a small trailer home with two children. They turned out to have other extended family members living with them, of which I was unaware. If I had known, I would, no doubt, have found several excuses not to make a home visit. Ever.

The first time I went out to the home, the physical therapist came with me. We naively knocked on the front door, both laden down with buckets of toys for Brandon. His mom opened the door and welcomed us in, then said, in a voice one might use to talk about the weather, "Oh -- don't put down your toys yet, I have to find the snake."

In a flash the physical therapist was back in the car, a trail of toys streaming behind her. She rolled down the window and yelled, "Let me know when it's safe! I'll just send my instructions by Morse from here."

And so there I was, nervously clutching my toys and hoping that if the snake found me, it might be placated by the toys while I fled back outside. But in a few minutes the snake had been located and escorted back to its cage.

Now this was no ordinary pet snake. It was a three-foot long boa constrictor who looked as if he'd like to have me for lunch. Brandon's mom introduced him as Squeezer. I sincerely hoped Squeezer did not learn to associate me with losing his freedom.

As I settled in -- as much as one can settle in when a snake is less than three feet away and peering out of a glass cage with beady eyes -- I noticed that the curtains seemed to be in some disarray. The snake...?

Then out of nowhere a large, ugly lizard leaped onto the curtains and scampered to the top of the window. "Oh, Iggy!" the mom said with mild exasperation. "Get down from there!"

From his cage, Squeezer eyed Iggy hungrily.

I nearly joined my colleague in the car. A snake AND a lizard? I smiled weakly at Brandon's mom and wondered what other surprises were lurking in there.

I soon found out when a cat and six kittens came tearing through the room, followed by a pot-bellied pig, which at the time were all the rage as pets. There was nowhere for me to escape; if I jumped on the couch I would be directly under Iggy, and anyway the cats were soon jumping all over the furniture themselves in an attempt to get away from the pig, whose legs were too short to propel him onto the couch, though he tried valiantly.

I assumed somewhere in all this mess was Brandon, who had cerebral palsy and moved about by dragging himself on the floor (at school he used a wheelchair, but of course there was no room in the trailer for that). But even if I had been able to locate him, clearly there was going to be no opportunity for intervention with him. I quickly threw out some of my least favorite toys -- knowing there was little chance I'd ever get them back -- and equally quickly tossed the mom some ideas for using them with Brandon. Then I scampered back to the car.

I was just in time, because the physical therapist was getting ready to leave without me, having assumed in the five minutes I had been in the house that I had been devoured by the snake. Needless to say, any additional intervention was done with Brandon at school.

There is a sad -- depending on your point of view -- postscript to this story: Squeezer, who didn't like anyone interfering with his meals, tried to attack Brandon's mom as she was feeding him a mouse. So a tearful family goodbye was said to Squeezer. I did not ask if they simply let him loose in the nearby woods; I thought it better not to know.

Iggy, the lizard, took advantage one day of an open door and made a break for freedom. He promptly got run over by a car. Can you imagine the look on the face of the driver? "Dear, I think we just ran over a small dinosaur."

The kittens were all given away as pets, only the mother remaining with Brandon's family. They had high hopes for the pig, whose name I have long forgotten, and indeed he escaped serious harm for a few years. After Brandon had moved from my caseload to a preschool classroom, his mom brought the pig to school as sort of a show and tell. She put the pig in a wagon and toured around the school. The kids in one room got so excited that the pig got excited and went to the bathroom all over the wagon. The health agency later told the family they'd need to get rid of the pig.

After that, whenever I got a new child on my caseload, I always asked the family how many other children they had -- after asking whether they had a snake.