The Tortoise Department of Childhood

More about The Tortoise Department of Childhood

When I was seven, I owned a tortoise for approximately one day.

That was enough time to become responsible for somebody who had brought his own house.

My sister built him another house out of two-by-fours. It was a strange wooden maze. You could enter one part of it and become interested in another part and spend the afternoon getting there.

We put him inside.

He looked at the lumber with the expression of an old carpenter who had been asked to live in a drawer.

During the night, he climbed out.

I was asleep, being seven. There were things I hadn’t learned yet, and most of them were outside.

In the morning I found him in the busy street. His shell was shattered.

I stood beside him while cars continued going places.

The street had no way of knowing that it had become the most terrible street in the world. It kept doing its work.

I had owned him for a day, but I missed him for much longer. Apparently those two kinds of time were kept in different places.

Later we got other tortoises.

My cousin had one. We had another. I kept ours in the backyard, where there was grass and a fence and everything a person might mistake for enough.

He escaped.

A neighbour found him and told me.

I went over and carried him home. His feet moved slowly in the air, continuing a journey that I had temporarily made inconvenient.

I put him back in the yard.

He escaped again.

It became a small neighbourhood service. Somebody would discover my tortoise and I would collect him, like a library book that had walked to the wrong house.

He never seemed pleased or disappointed to see me. He let me pick him up. That was all.

I checked the fence. I looked beneath things. I tried to think like a tortoise, but I always ended up thinking like a boy who wanted his tortoise to stay.

Then one day he left and nobody found him.

For a while I expected a neighbour to appear at the gate, holding that familiar piece of the backyard.

Nobody did.

I think he escaped permanently.

Even now, I prefer to imagine him somewhere beyond the houses, stopping beneath a leaf.

He has found a place where nobody knows he belongs to me.