Paco the Turtle

            Throughout the years of my life, I have totaled the numbers of pets that I ever had to around sixty. This is including four dogs, six puppies, three cats, one ferret, two birds, a jackrabbit, a rabbit, a box turtle, a Gardner snake, five gerbils, four hamsters, and a school of around thirty goldfish…and a snail.

            Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that this is a lot of pets, but there is one pet that I would like to focus on; the Box turtle of `06: Paco.You see, the story of Paco is one heck of a story and it goes like this.

            During this time of my life, my dad ended his last year of being a Truck Driver. He was returned home from his last drive. The year 2006 was the year that Hurricane Katrina hit, and it was raining everywhere along the coastal states, including Texas. The road my father was taking was really wet, slippery, and dark. While on the way home, he hit a bump in the dark… only it wasn’t a bump. The “bump” in question here appeared as a small box turtle; a living box turtle with half of his shell shattered by the wheels of the 18-wheeler. My dad got of his truck, and saw the poor, hurt animal; blood everywhere, and pieces of shell on the wet, slippery road. My dad picked up the turtle and any visible pieces of the shell that he saw and rushed on home.

            He got home around 10:00 p.m., (way past my bedtime, but I wanted to wait up for my dad to come home, and a first-person witness to all of this), and he comes barging in, all wet with rainwater and turtle blood, and he rushes up to my mom. My mother was and remains a nursing assistant at Texas Tech, and my dad runs up to her and says…”Josie,…you wanna play Doctor...”. My mother appeared all confused and then she saw the turtle. She went ballistic and started grabbing medical supplies that she had stored away. She went to work on that turtle. I don’t see how she performed “surgery” on the turtle, because I ran from the room after being grossed out by all the blood. Yeeek!

            The next day, my dad woke me and my siblings up, and told all of us to go outside to the back. We obeyed, and on the backyard patio table, there stood a living, small box turtle with a duct-taped-bandage wrapped around the lower half of his shell. My little brother and sister become eccentric and happy, for they had a new turtle pet, but I knew how we got this turtle, and how my parents saved a live the past night.

Many years had passed, and Paco`s shell had healed nicely and we had decided it was the perfect time to return Paco to his original home, the Desert Wilderness. My dad had driven out of El Paso, to around the same area that he had had his first encounter with Paco. My dad then marched a few steps from the road, and placed Paco on the dusty, dry ground. My father then returned home, and that was the end of Paco`s life with us.

I wonder what has happened to Paco in the last few years. Worst case scenario he had probably already passed on, but I still like to think that he`s still somewhere out there, just roaming the desert.

“Bye-Bye, Paco…”

            P.S. it was my dad`s idea to name the turtle Paco, (which was usually the name you would give a parrot) because turtle seem to have beaks similar to parrots.