The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (8 page)

But I was older now, and it wasn’t the house that I’d miss but the people and animals that had been woven into the fabric of my life in Virginia Beach. Marcy had become a second sister to me, and I was leaving her behind. My grandparents were staying in their apartment in Newport News. I didn’t have my guinea pig, George, for comfort because my parents hadn’t let me bring him; George was now living in a cage next to Marcy’s rabbit. My parents had sold Tip and left Yankee, our newly adopted collie/shepherd, with our grandparents. The gerbils were all sold to pet stores or given away to schools, even Kinky, before Dad hosed out the garage and watered
his little trees one last time. My whole world had been pulled out from beneath me like a scatter rug.

“Baby baby baby,” Donald sang in my ear, pinching me as hard as he could, leaving red welts on my bare legs as the Summer of Love brought three hundred thousand protestors against the Vietnam War to New York.

Our family was in no mood for love-ins. Mom turned off the car radio and shook her head over the news of antiwar demonstrations not just in New York, where you’d expect that sort of thing, but all over the country, too. “Those dirty hippies,” she said. “What do they know about duty?”

“They’ll never last,” Dad agreed.

Our only stop before Kansas was my father’s childhood home in Ohio, where Donald and I slept in the stifling, slope-roofed attic room that had once belonged to Dad and his younger brother, Pete. The room was still full of fascinating relics: arrowheads and stamp collections, books on insects and BB guns, and the detritus of a boyhood spent dreaming of a world where every question has an answer.

T
HE
oldest of three children, my father was born to Donald and Rebecca Robinson on April 21, 1928, in Montgomery, Ohio, a place that Dad always said had more churches than stores “because there’s nothing to do there but plant your crops and pray.”

According to my grandmother Robinson’s diary, which I read many years after she died, “little Don-Don too often cuts up high jinks.” By age two, my dad had reached the point where he “jabbers all day, says ‘no’ to everything,” and “is
always asking ‘What’s that?’” He “pulled the butterfly table over on him” one day “burned his fingers on the oil stove” the next, and managed to pry the cover off an electrical outlet, earning an electric shock for his curiosity.

While noting that “Don-Don has learned to spit—also lots of other things,” Grandmother Robinson revealed her survival strategy, which turned out to be the same one I use now with my youngest son Aidan: “I try to keep Don-Don outside as much as I can.”

What sort of twisted path would lead such a child into gerbil farming instead of into other, possibly more logical career options, such as dynamiting bridges?

Here’s where the nurture part of the nature-versus-nurture debate comes in: children absorb every experience that comes their way, but only some stick. You can’t tell until years later which childhood experiences will become permanent features of their interior landscapes as adults.

In my dad’s case, he experienced early on that raising animals at home could be profitable. One of his childhood neighbors in Ohio, Frank Maxfield, was a chemist employed by Procter and Gamble who raised mice, rats, hamsters, rabbits, and guinea pigs in a blue barn behind his peak-roofed farmhouse. Maxfield sold the animals to research scientists at various institutions. My father played with Maxfield’s children and envied their extra spending money. He longed to live more like they did. Or, even better, like the Fleischmann family, whose palatial Yeast Estate was just down the road.

Dad’s own family lived in a modest white box of a house next to the railroad tracks. Once a week, the steam engine ran behind the Robinson home from Montgomery to Blue Ash,
making it a natural stop for ragmen and train tramps who begged for food at the kitchen door. Before World War II, Dad’s father ran a gas station, where he was once stabbed with an ice pick and another time kidnapped and taken out to a field, where the robbers poured whiskey down his throat and took his money.

Once the war started, Grandfather Robinson worked on an assembly line at the Wright Aircraft Factory. As a boy, my dad used to lie in bed at night and listen to the steady
zoom-zoom
sound of aircraft engines being tested, a sound that steadily fed his fantasies about joining the military.

By the time Dad hit high school, he was earning his own way by delivering newspapers and working in the local drugstore. The pharmacist trained my father to compound prescriptions, and by age sixteen Dad could fill them on his own. He used down time between customers to mix up his own gunpowder, wrap it in aluminum foil, and lay these delicious little dynamite capsules under the streetcar tracks at regular intervals, so that it sounded like a machine gun firing when the trolley went by.

Dad had his own pets—he was especially fond of white mice—but he longed to be a world-famous explorer like Martin Johnson and bring back new species “from darkest Africa.” Johnson, who left home at fourteen to work on a cattle boat, later became the first filmmaker to capture classic aerial scenes of giraffes and elephants stampeding across the African plains. My father watched Johnson’s movies by sneaking into the local drive-in movie theater on foot, but the closest he came to being Martin Johnson was a mail-order taxidermy course he took in high school that cost him $12 of his hard-earned
drugstore money. Completing his taxidermy assignments required walking up and down the rural roads of Ohio to find dead birds and animals. Dad enthusiastically ordered the accessories he needed to complete his projects—squirrel skulls and birds’ eyes—through catalogs, just as he would order his first gerbils more than twenty years later.

My father’s thorough understanding of animal physiology and anatomy would come in handy like when he was making his own mini-documentaries of gerbils suffering seizures in our Virginia garage. First, though, Dad had to escape the confines of Montgomery, Ohio.

Love led him to join the Navy. Dad’s high school sweetheart was a fair-skinned, blue-eyed beauty named Ann Lloyd, whom he called “Angel Eyes.” Ann and her family represented everything my dad longed to achieve. Ann’s father, John T. Lloyd, owned Lloyd Pharmaceutical Company, which had made it big with Chigger-Ease. Her grandfather, John Uri Lloyd, was not only a research chemist but also a best-selling novelist. The family owned a vacation home with an in-ground pool—a rarity in Ohio back then—and a horse stable.

Before their high school graduation, a friend suggested that my father go to West Point. Dad took this idea to heart: West Point offered horsemanship classes, and Dad was bent on convincing Ann that he was worthy of her. He knew horses were the way to her heart. At the time, however, West Point had no vacancies, so my father’s congressman nominated him to the Naval Academy instead.

Dad was admitted to Annapolis despite the fact that he couldn’t swim and had never even seen the ocean. The Navy
wasn’t in my father’s plans, but it was his ticket to adventure. He eagerly left Ohio and set forth to serve his country.

In return for his service, the Navy led him straight back to love. My mother’s older brother, Donald Keach, joined the Navy and met my father during the Korean War, when both were young officers on the USS
John R. Pierce
. When my uncle Don was injured by gunfire on the
Pierce
, it was my father who was sent to accompany him home to Maine, where Dad met my mother.

“It was love at first sight,” Dad still says, “just because of the way your mother looked up at me and laughed with those brown eyes.”

At the time, Mom was a senior at the University of Maine and dating several different men. “Those were the days when every girl had just one goal, and that was to get married,” she explained to me once. “Marriage was our very reason for being.”

Men in the military had a certain aura, she said, and Dad had seen enough of the world to seem confident and decisive. He also had a movie star’s height and lean physique, a strong jaw, blue eyes, and tight curls of sandy hair. To add to his appeal, after their first date, Dad went back to sea and wrote my mother “a drawerful of beautiful letters.” She had graduated from the university by then and was working for a Maine newspaper while deciding between job possibilities at the UN, Pan Am, and the BBC in London.

“If you want to see the world, I’ll show you the world,” Dad promised during his next shore duty—officially, their third date—and confessed that he’d been thinking of asking her to marry him.

“Well, are you going to ask or aren’t you?” my mother wanted to know.

Dad, forever the prepared Boy Scout, immediately pulled a little blue velvet bag out of his pocket and showed her the diamond inside it. “How do you want it set?” he asked.

“When I told him I wanted platinum, he gasped a little, but that’s what I got,” Mom told me. “Don’t ever be afraid to ask for what you want in life.”

flat, dry, tornado- and witch-plagued land I knew from
The Wizard of Oz
. This Kansas was green and hilly and much prettier than the swampy Tidewater region of Virginia that was rapidly dimming in my memory as we drove mile after mile away from it. We’d been in the car forever, and so we were excited to arrive, especially when Dad explained that there were Indians living nearby. Donald imagined being scalped while I daydreamed about owning a silver horse like the Lone Ranger and having a best Indian friend of my own, one who rode a pinto pony bareback and warned me of dangers on the road ahead.

Mom, though, was not happy. She wasn’t accustomed to spending so much uninterrupted time with Dad. Whenever they fought about something—usually his driving—she’d threaten to get on the next Greyhound bus traveling in the opposite direction. Being from Maine, she also viewed the Midwest as provincial and said she couldn’t imagine living here, especially stuck on a fort surrounded by Army families.

“But what’s the difference between the Army and the
Navy?” I asked. “I mean, other than working on land instead of on a ship?”

“Navy people are higher-class than Army,” Mom explained. “In the Army they just want bodies. You don’t have to be smart to join.”