On Being A Man

Yesterday morning I was killing some time before dropping D2 off at school, as her accomplice in 2 periods worth of hookey, to avoid a math test, when I decided to go feed my pond fish.

The dogs raced to the pond and started barking and whining, especially the Bassett, who is quite the hound. I soon saw what excited them --a large, dead animal, lying partially in the water, by the far bank.

I'd had dead animals there before, usually raccoons, but this thing was different. It was brown, about 2 feet long, and fat. I called D2 out to see it. Her take: "Yuck! Gross!"

I went inside and did some research. For some reason, my distant past Biology studies evoked the term "water rat" in my reptilian (rodent?) brain. Sure enough, with no more than 3 clicks, I had identified the dead critter: it was a Florida round tailed muskrat.

It turns out that muskrats don't live in Florida, except for ths species, which has a round tail instead of the typical flat one.

So, humming the Captain and Tenille's awful tune from the 70s, "Muskrat Love," I fetched my net, some hefty bags, and a box.

There was ZERO chance anyone else in my house was going to do this unpleasant job. Had D1 been home, she wouldn't have even gone NEAR the pond. D2 would sooner touch radioactive waste than a dead animal, and Wifey would have offered "Who can we call to come take care of this???"

Actually, I thought for a minute about calling Mike, myself. He's my camping friend --always catching lizards and turtles with his son Chris, and he'd have found the task amusing. In fact, he might have even wanted to perform a necropsy to determine the cause of death.

No, I summoned the testosterone I have left (dwindling each day, it seems) and bucked up. Here is the downside of being a man. It's not all the fun of dressing like a slob, and peeing outside at night.

I tried to lift Ed (by now I named him after the crying senator, Ed Muskie), but he was wedged pretty good in between some rocks. I had to pry him lose, whereupon he flipped in the water and floated away, exposing his scary looking (more so in death) rodent teeth.

I was able to get the net around him, and I lifeted his waterlogged carcass. Damn thing must have weighed 30 pounds! Luckily, the net held, and I plopped him into the waiting hefty bags. Of course, the net stuck to his softened flesh, so THAT took some wiggling to extract the net.

And then came the stink! Suffice it to say, I now have a new metaphor for describing a putrid smell. It is "Jeez --this smells like wet, dead muskrat!"

If there is a worse smell on this earth, I don't know WHAT it is.

Anyway, I now had a boxed, dead Florida muskrat, and my inner Bart Simpson spoke up: "Does anyone deserve to have this left at their door?" Fortunately, the answer was negative, as I do have SOME maturity to go along with my diminishing masculinity.

I tossed Ed into the green trash bin, to await burial by Miami Dade's Department of Solid (not for long) Waste.

So --mission accomplished. I washed off the net, but left it by the pond, to remind myself, for the next few days, that I AM the only one in this house with a Y chomosome.

Meanwhile, the community cat, Nala, watched these proceedings with great alacrity. I immediately decided that she was the muskrat murderer. Cats!