Every year on my sister’s birthday, I make a donation to Bat World Sanctuary in her name, and on mine, she contributes to Heifer International.
While
our choices of beneficence may suggest not-too-subtle metaphorical
underpinnings, these are actually two of our favorite charities.
Our
aunt was a biologist who was one of the world's foremost authorities on Myotis Lucifigus (the North American
Little Brown Bat) and taught us how harmless bats are and how useful to the
environment. And Heifer International gives livestock (ducks, lambs,
pigs, cows etc.) to third world families and teaches them how to care for the
animals and increase the flock for a sustainable source of food.
For
my most recent birthday, I was genuinely touched to learn that a llama had been
donated to a family in the high Andes on my behalf. The sale of the wool would help pay for food,
education, and medicines for the recipient family. The donation announcement included a note
from my sister: “I hope this is also a corrective emotional experience.”
Boy, my sister
really knows how to hurt a person. The
Llama Incident has been on my conscience for decades and she knows it. But let me say in my defense that every new bride
makes mistakes. Is there a bride out
there who has not left the bag of innards in the turkey? Who has not confused a bulb for a clove of
garlic and ended up with a beef stew that could wipe out New Jersey?
But I’ll admit
that my desecrating the llama was probably a little more unusual. I was a young bride, still in college.
Inexperienced in the ways of the world, and specifically, wool cleaning.
Of course, it
wasn’t a whole llama, just the skin of one, which my parents had received as a
gift and which I persuaded them to lend me for my tiny newlywed apartment. Naturally, a white long-haired llama skin
gets pretty dirty after a while, so the next time I called home, I asked my
mother if it might be washable.
Dry-cleaning on a student budget was out of the question. She said she thought it was.
Now,
afterwards, Mom insisted that what she meant by “washable” was that I might put
the llama skin ever so carefully into a bathtub full of cold water with the
teeniest drop of Woolite and poke it very gently from time to time with my
index finger.
Mom said she
NEVER meant that I should take it down to the basement laundry room and throw
it in the Jumbomatic Super-Washer with a whole load of underwear. (Even I knew better than to mix whites and
darks.)
Well, imagine
my utter dismay when I went down to get my laundry and found that the backing
on the skin had somehow disintegrated (I only used warm!) and I had a whole
washer load of wet, hairy llama with all of our dainties hopelessly (and I do
mean hopelessly) entangled within.
I was
miserable. The waste! Not only had I ruined this beautiful skin but
this meant that the donor llama had died in vain. Not to mention, it wasn’t even my llama. What was I going to tell the folks, I
agonized, as I stood there tearfully hacking the matted (but so clean!) mass from
its death grip on the agitator with a meat cleaver (wedding gift). Finally succeeding, there was nothing to do but
put the big hairy ball in the dryer. All
of our underwear was in there somewhere.
It was truly
weeks before we could extricate all the laundry from the tightly tangled mass
of hair, which we kept conveniently piled on top of our dresser. My last task before bed at night was to
delicately, painstakingly, extricate a set of undergarments for the next day from
the llama with a pair of nail scissors.
Friends would
ask us, “What’s that big hairy thing on your dresser?” (It was a small one-bedroom apartment and you
needed to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom.) And to his credit, my then-husband would put
his arm around me protectively and say, “It’s a llama with underwear in
it.”
Unfortunately
for me, it became a favorite family story: The Time Inga Ran the Llama Through
the Washer and Ended Up with a Hair Ball the Size of Connecticut.
So I was truly
grateful to my sister for what was some long overdue llama therapy. I couldn’t bring back the first llama but I
could bring food and warmth and income to a family far away who probably knew
better than to wash animal skins in an automatic washer, not that they likely had
one anyway.
I feel better
already.
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