A Translation of Zooey's Meows

A few years ago I wrote a column for my college newspaper entitled “Professor Radington.” That was the name I christened a plastic robot I found discarded beside a heap of curbside trash in Wrigleyville, following hours of PBR-chugging with my friends in Chicago. Moments after lugging the Professor into my friend's apartment, I was grasping hold of his plastic claws, spinning in a circle, his stumpy frame in rotation around mine in the way that a planet orbits its Sun. P-Rad's novelty did not wear off when I sobered-up in the morning. He made the trip with us back to Oshkosh and I decided that, in addition to serving as a bizarre decoration and apartment mascot, I was going to pay him tribute with a humor column.

The idea for the piece was that I was eagerly awaiting fatherhood (which wasn't the truth), but I wanted to be sure I could meet the daunting challenge before undertaking such a major responsibility. And so I tired my hand at dog ownership, with poor results, and consequently lowered my standards down to comatosed dogs, houseplants, and finally, after all these endeavors had failed in one way or another, plastic robots. Dogs, coma dogs, houseplants, and plastic robots—that was the chain of ownership in Bullshitland. In the column, I did prove to be a worthy father for P-Rad. Inanimate objects are safe in my care. As for creatures with a heartbeat, I am less adept at meeting their needs.

Oddly enough, for several years I really did own a pet, a (semi-) legitimate stepping stone on the path to fatherhood. It never occurred to me to apply this life experience to an absurd column that proposed a hierarchy of care-taking that ranged from plastic robots to children. On this scale, aquatic frogs rank somewhere between houseplants and coma-dogs.

My frog, named Kermit, with little creativity, survived for about eight years, provided ten minutes of entertainment in that time, received virtually no affection (mainly because human touch could be damaging to this breed of frogs), and required sporadic maintenance. I came to acquire Kermit when I was eleven years old. For Christmas in 1994, besides Chicago Cubs attire and Super Nintendo games, with brash ambition, I asked for a dog. Deep down, I knew it was a forlorn wish since my dad has a disdain for pets. As kids, we were allowed to keep goldfish, because they were quiet, cheap, and dispensable, but any creature with four legs was simply out of the question. My dad reasoned that six life forms under one roof was sufficient. The Olig household was kept in a state of sterility—all walls were painted white, as if vibrant colors would incite neuroses and thuggery, the Oldies station played at a barely audible volume, providing familiar background noise while my dad filled out his crossword puzzle, and my parents generally believed it was foolish and impractical to feed yet another irresponsible stain-creator.

The reason why Kermit was excluded in my column about Professor Radington is that I hardly considered him a pet; he was more of a living, breathing afterthought. Once a day I had to scoop two crusty food pellets into his tank. Once a month I had to provide him fresh water to swim around in, dumping him into a smaller container temporarily until the change was made. In his twilight years, Kermit croaked in loud repetition throughout the night and became a real nuisance. Apparently, the lesson my parents were trying to teach me by giving me Kermit for Christmas was this: Pets are a pain the ass, son, and they're not worth the trouble.

For the month of July in 2009 I sublet an apartment in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. I shared a two-bedroom place with Anna, a thoughtful and cute earthy girl without pretensions who had recently graduated from the Roosevelt Acting Academy. She was becoming a strong-willed, independent adult, which is a very serious business, and so she liked to keep a box of crayons, a sheet of drawing paper, and a hash-pipe nearby whenever possible, as sort of a reward to the struggle. She owned unicorn's head attached to stick that the make-believe rider could straddle, which she kept on the back porch, leaning against the glass table where we placed our ashtrays and drinks. I named the unicorn Rhonda, a name Anna loathed and rejected, though she never offered an acceptable alternative. Rhonda was to Anna what Professor Radington was to me. Anna's kitten, whom she had owned for eight months, had ran away not long before I moved into the apartment, and perhaps Rhonda the unicorn filled the void in some capacity—in that hollow, unsatisfying way unique to inanimate objects.

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The rest of "Zooey's Meows" is available for your reading pleasure within my book. In case you'd like to order a copy...

www.xlibris.com/NickOlig.html