1st WITCH. Round about the cauldron go; In the poison'd entrails throw.—
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
2nd WITCH.Those witches in MacBeth knew how to cook up a poison stew.
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Today I'm thinking about poison after the demise (I believe) of my pet red-spotted newt, a creature whose skin is toxic enough to kill college students drunk enough or challenged enough by peers to eat them and die.
Now, as long as you don't plan to eat your red-spotted newts, keeping them is perfectly safe, though washing hands well after handling them is an obviously wise move. They actually do well in captivity, living up to 20 years, according to a former amphibian zookeeper whose site I'll cite here soon. (Misplaced modifier alert! No, the zookeeper isn't an amphibian; he cares for amphibians in a zoo, ha.)
Of course, you must carefully care (no redundancy there) for these little creatures, and they do require specific care, such as calcium in their diets, to live very long. I asked said expert whether I could keep them in a terrarium filled with the soil and moss from my back yard, the place where I'd found my pets, periodically replenishing that soil with new from the yard so the tiny organisms the newts feed on would be restored.
The expert told me I could easily keep them ten years with this system, especially if I augment their diet with freshly caught tasties such as (small) earthworms dusted with calcium powder and rolly-pollies aka potato bugs. The latter's tiny armadillo-like exoskeletons contain lots of calcium. The humus-rich soil and leaf litter from my yard contains the newt's favorite delicacy, the snow flea, so Fred and Ethel would get many fresh batches of their comfort food.
Eft is the juvenile, terrestrial stage of the newt. A bright orange jewel on damp brown leaf litter after a rain is how you'll most likely find one of these creatures that are so prevalent in Appalachia.
In the case of one of my adorable missing eft, HE was not poisonous. I was.
For I fear I might have crushed him while rearranging things in his terrarium. It's Fred, not Ethel, who went missing--he was the bigger of two so he'd been called the male, though, in fact, terrestrial efts are asexual. Newts don't develop sexually until they return to the water to, once again, morph into a new stage, this time becoming mostly water-bound as they were when "tadpoles," and maturing at last so that they can reproduce.
A common death for efts in the wild is being crushed beneath the feet of forest creatures, including humans, who tromp through the woods, or windfall, or rolling rocks. Smugly, I thought I could save them from this and other dangers in the wild, having come to terms with zookeeping, etc., after having read The Life of Pi.
[Note: I actually originally started penning this episode over a year ago, and I'm happy to report that Ethel is still alive and well, occasionally gracing us with her brilliant orange self, though most frequently safely tucked away under moss or in the cavities of a piece of driftwood in the vivarium.]
But now, fearing I've crushed poor Fred while pressing stones into the surface of the soil to look like a pathway--who knew efts could tunnel under soil? I do now!-- my karma rains upon me, and I hear my dad, a man I know loved me as much as life itself, say to me in anger:
"Mary Dell, you're poison!"
Ouch.
Not only that, he said this to me when I was something like 20 years old, and all I could think was that he'd held in that sentiment all the years of my childhood but the words had bubbled up to the surface like that toxic witch's brew and had finally burst out when his hard-won filters told him I was old enough to handle it.
Yeah, right. Didn't scar me at all.
Those words don't ring in my ears every time I break or otherwise ruin something which, given my Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), is far too frequent.
The thing is, yes, it hurts, but it's also kind of funny.
I mean, I'm sure my dad felt even worse than I did when the heinous term spat from his lips, and I've said one or two regrettable things to my own children during the stress of child-rearing, and how desperately I wish I'd had one more moment of patience, so I know how bad it feels.
So, Dear Viewers ask, why had Dear Old Dad called me poison?
For a truly unforgivable reason: My brand-new husband and I had borrowed an air mattress and a pump for a camping trip at Assateague, an ill-fated trip that included a vicious electrical storm that whipped our tent around its pole like a tattered flag while we watched, soaked to the bone, practically hoping we would be struck by lightning we were so miserable. Should have been a sign.
While setting up before that, we had plugged Dad's pump into the car cigarette lighter and filled the mattresses that made sleeping on the ground far more bearable.
However, due to my poisonous touch, apparently, the plug had melted when we used it.
The funny part now is wondering what I'd done all those oblivious years before to make him think I was poison, and how tough it must have been all those years to keep his frustrations in, and how this "last straw" had caused it all to come out in one foul (yes, I know it's "fell") swoop of a sentence:
"Mary Dell, you're poison."
It's not hard to come up with some examples, again based on my then-undiagnosed ADD:
- The time my sixth-grade best friend Corny (short for Cornelia) and I climbed the steeply pitched roof of my family's Cape Cod and peeked over the top--my dad in the street, working on one of his several Karmann Ghias he swapped parts among to keep at least one running at a time, happened to look up and see our heads silhouetted up there against the skyline, and what came after wasn't pretty.
- The time Corny and I got caught shoplifting--my last time, and hers as well, she recently told me after we'd reconnected on Facebook--at the local drug store and got hauled down to the police station in a paddy wagon--a very effective deterrent to future pilferings, let me tell you.
- He probably held me responsible for the totaling of the beautiful little Karmann Ghia he'd helped me buy as my first car, even though we were both sitting at the breakfast table when the doorbell rang, and a man stood there with eyes open wide, as if he were scared--
"You'd better come and look at your car, man!"
The guy had been making a three-point turn in our narrow street, and as he'd backed up at, what, a half a mile an hour?, he crunched my sweet little Ghia to the point it had to be totaled. Not a sweeping endorsement of the car's safety on the road--on my first day as a licensed driver, I took that baby out on the DC Beltway where it passed tractor trailers that could crush it like a tin can, but, hey, it was a hell of a lot of fun to drive. And tres cute.Actually, the car didn't have to be totaled, but the insurance company said it would cost as much to fix it as it was worth, so the choice was mine.
And, to my everlasting regret, I chose the check, deciding I'd buy a bike to ride through Sligo Park to my new job as a legal secretary in Silver Spring, which I actually did for a while despite a very narrow shoulder and a number of close calls with cars coming around curves behind me. I had attained that job at the tender age of seventeen, having skipped my junior year of high school so I could graduate with my boyfriend, who, after about eight months apart afterwards while we both played the field, I would marry far too young.
Did I say I have ADD? Undiagnosed then, it led me to frequently behave impulsively, making more than a few dumb choices, and being too impatient at the time to go to college, another bad choice I eventually would rectify. Of course, I cannot regret my marriage even if it had been an unlikely match, as it gave me the two best sons on the planet.
My father loved his Karmann Ghias, and he had selected the perfect little specimen I drove and paid half its price for me--until that fateful morning when it was "totaled," the car had no damage inside or out, not even the smashed-in nose most of them harbored because of a design flaw Porsche, believe it or not, had made.
I know what I did hurt my dad. He had given me the choice, and I'd made the wrong one. And now it hurts me that I had been so damned selfish. In my defense I was seventeen, one of the most selfish times in a human being's life, but the memory pains me nevertheless.
And the reason I wanted that check was because the wreck happened during a highly misguided six months or so when I was in utter but unacknowledged panic about the rest of my life and running around with two very bad influences, older than I, who were leading me down the toxic garden path of hard drugs.
I'm happy to report that my walk down that poisoned path ended without major consequences, or so I'd thought at the time. No addiction. No arrests. No overdose. No giving blow jobs for a Dilaudid, as the female in the couple told me she'd had to do on more than one occasion for their dealer, Sapphire, among others.
No, "no" consequences ... just Hepatitis C poisoning my blood for twenty-five years before the Red Cross discovered it when I gave blood for the first time at the behest of my high school English students.
Actually, however, I wrote the previous paragraph merely for effect, to show that hard drugs are INDEED dangerous, sports fans, and you may not find out how dangerous until decades after you've tried them, even if just once.
In my case, however, I'm positive my Hepatitis C had NOT originated from doing drugs, as stupid as doing so was. I clearly remember Carol, one of the two members of the couple who'd taken me with them on their self-destructive path, insisting that Fred inject me only with fresh, clean needles freely given away at drug stores. They shared and reused needles to save them from having to get more anytime soon, but Carol, bless her, insisted that all of mine be clean, not previously used, and not shared.
No, I got my Hepatitis C when I was given two transfusions in 1980 while undergoing a D and C (a scraping of the uterus) in a Washington, DC, hospital because the placenta for my son's birth had not fully detached and remained inside, causing ongoing bleeding, and I was given two pints of obviously tainted blood from the DC blood supply in the years just before AIDS broke and that supply began to get tested.
Ironically, that blood likely came from a drug user, since they would give blood for money in those days. Who knows, maybe, in fact, that blood came from Carol or her boyfriend after all. Also unintentionally ironic is that this episode is about the missing Fred Newt, innocently named after the male Mertz of the Mertzes who owned the Ricardos' apartment in I Love Lucy (of course), but ties in to my brief relationship with Carol and her boyfriend Fred.
I'm just grateful I didn't contract AIDS, as human Fred did and died a few years after I'd hung out with them. I might have missed that poison's entry into the drug supply by a year or two, thank God. Not that Hep C is a picnic, and people do die from it, but AIDS would have killed me long ago for sure since I would've contracted it before life-saving medicines had been developed. As sick as I am today with my myriad health problems, at least I was spared that fate.
No one knew these particular disease-related consequences of drug use back in those ancient days. As I said, AIDS hadn't reared its ugly head, to anyone's knowledge, at that point, and Hepatitis C wouldn't be identified until 1989, a decade after my own stupidity and nearly that long after I'd been gifted two pints of blood apparently carrying the nasty little virus by the hospital I'd come to for a procedure that was supposed to make me healthier, one of life's ironies of so many it proffers.
Newts--members of the salamander family--often go through three stages: first, as a tadpole-like larva found in vernal springs (I just love the word "vernal, don't you?), then as a terrestrial juvenile called an "eft," and finally as an adult, again mostly aquatic though capable of being on land as well, which enables survival in an ever-changing boundary between land and water.
Red-spotted newts in their eft stage are a brilliant orange and sport little red spots ringed with black along their torsos. They are about as cute a critter as walks the earth--rather human-like, if you can imagine, with their tiny hands and feet, fingers and toes.
Think about the GEICO gecko, the term "lounge lizards," and the fact that the phyology of humans is the same as that of newts (yes, sports fans, it's true), and you'll understand how I can say an eft strangely resembles a human, which makes them awfully cute, I must say, even though humans often are far from cute in their behavior.
Don't worry, Nature Freaks, my yard is a newt haven, and I left plenty of these very common creatures in the wild to continue propagating their kind--but I mourn little Fred who hasn't shown his cute little orange head for some time (and never did), while hearing Dad's epithet ringing in my ears:
Mary Dell, you're poison.
No doubt, Fred would agree.
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