When a full-grown River Otter waddled down the hallway at my father’s house during dinnertime, cautiously crossed over the tile in the foyer, before finding its way under the dining room table, my 84-year-old dad was the only one who saw it, because he was the only one on anti-seizure medication at the time, which was known to cause full blown hallucinations. Hallucinations and anger.
For a man who was known to fly off the handle over a “Son of a bitchin’ button! that just came off my fuckin’ shirt!” this was a drug side effect match made in Hell. “Warning! May cause wild hallucinations and anger in people who are already pretty angry!”
So, it was no surprise to anyone when my stepmother told us that his first reaction to this hallucination was anger…toward her because from where he was tripping, she seemed perfectly fine with this thing not only in the house, but curled up at his feet during a meal, no less. “You can’t even be bothered to look up from your Mexican Salad?” he started
“What are you talking about?” she asked
“You’re just going to sit there and tell me that you didn’t just see that?”
“See what Gene Kearin?” she wondered aloud.
“You didn’t just see a big otter park itself under this dinner table?”
Helen then very cautiously pushed her chair back and peered under the table, but only saw my dad’s furious little legs down there, itching for a kick fight.
“An otter?” she said incredulously. “Now how on earth would an otter get into a tract home in Northridge, California?”
My father, a civil engineer for over 50 years by that time and no stranger to aerial survey photographs of the north rim of the San Fernando Valley growled. “There’s God damned water sources!”
She cut him off. “Look for yourself!” she snapped.
“I don’t have to!” he yelled. “I saw him go under there!”
But eventually, my father did peek down there and had to concede, there was no otter down there and for some reason it didn’t look like an otter had ever been under that table because it was perfectly dry. He was quiet for the rest of dinner and stared for long stretches into the many, many colors of his Mexican Salad, but knowing my dad, he wasn’t feeling sad, confused or defeated about what happened. He wasn’t in self-pity or weighing his options or wondering which was worse, the seizures or the medication…that was our job. No, I know my father was taking a silent vow to find and catch that fuckin’ thing, wherever it was hiding in his house.
He was pushing those little tortilla shards around the iceberg lettuce and hatching a plan.