My Turtle History...

After posting last time about the turtle sighting as the mini-Marx's prepared to leave Sadieville, it occurred to me that it might be a good time to include a little 'turtle history'. When I was a teenager (long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away!!!), I found myself interested in words. I could amuse myself at times by saying a word over and over and over to see how it sounded with prolonged usage. One that never failed to crack me up was 'ignore'. Now, just for fun, say it out loud over and over and over for a while. Here we go...ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore, etc. Now, don't you find yourself going more and more nasal sounding. It is just a very silly word. I said the word turtle one day and the more it rolled around in my mouth the more I liked the sound of it. It became my favorite word because I just really liked the sound of it. It remains my favorite word to this day. One day when working at CAPREIT, I was talking with Mike Pugh. He worked, at that time, in the cubicle next to me as an assistant to Dick Kadish, the owner and president of CAPREIT. I was an Executive Administrative Assistant to Jeff Goldshine, Sandy Becker and Ron Schattenberg, the 3 vice-presidents over Operations. Mike and I were near the same age and shared a lot in of common. One day we got to talking about words. I mentioned my favorite word was 'turtle' and asked if Mike had a favorite word. Mike said he did. It is 'flaucinaucinihilipilification'. It turns out that Mike worked transcribing political speeches and it was not uncommon for these political whiz people to throw in a word just to stump the transcribers. Mike and several others would take a few pages at the time of a speech as it was given and the goal was to have it ready for press release as quickly as possible when the speech was complete. I know in today's rapid fire society this my seem archaic to many of you, but nonetheless it is how it was done at that time. Mike got the portion of the speech with 'flaucinaucinihilipilification' in it. He quickly found the correct spelling and it has been his favorite word ever since. Just so YOU don't have to go to your dictionary this word is a noun and is rarely used. The definition is 'the estimation of something as valueless (encountered mainly as an example of one of the longest words in the English language).' Claude used to find unusual words and learn them so he could add and use them in his vocabulary. One of the ones I remember the most was 'penultimate'. The word is an adjective and means 'the next to the last'. So it is not the ultimate moment but the penultimate moment. Okay, back to turtles... When my kids were little (Nissa was 9, Andie was 7, and Jacob was 5), I was driving down a street in the Denver area in which we lived and I saw a little turtle crossing the street. I pulled my car to the side of the road and picked up that turtle and put it in the back seat of my car. When the kids got home from school, they had a wonderful and interesting new pet turtle. The kids got 2 cardboard boxes about the same size. They cut out an opening in one side of each box and taped the boxes together so that the openings fit together. Basically they made a 2 room home for their turtle. One box they kept full of grass. The other they put an bowl of water in and filled the floor of it with sand that inclined so the turtle could climb up to the water bowl. They found a little paper American flag and put it on the inside wall of one of the boxes. They named the turtle Toby. Toby could now get up each morning and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Then he could stroll over for a morning drink of water. We had a little metal sign on the gate to our back yard that read 'Watch out for Dogs' left from the previous owners. The kids took a permanent marker and scratched out 'dogs' and wrote in 'turtle'. Jacob was in kindergarten and would dutifully get up each morning and take Toby to the bathroom and run water from the sink over his shell, then give Toby and kiss and put him back in his box. Jake was due to have his first school pictures taken one day. He got up that morning to provide Toby with his morning ritual. Since it was October and Toby was ready to find a place to hibernate soon, he was not really happy with the ritual so he bit Jake's upper lip. I heard a blood curdling scream and Jake yelling "MA!!!" I ran to the bathroom and there stood my little guy with a turtle hanging off his upper lip. I couldn't do anything but yank Toby the Turtle off his lip. So for Jake's 1st school picture, he has a turtle's lip print on his upper lip.So there you have it...my love of turtles and a few stories from my turtle history.