Memory Monday: Duck Martin

When I was about ten, I begged my parents for another pet.  Of course, a horse was always at the top of my list, but we didn't have room for a horse and we already had dogs.  I didn't care what it was, I just wanted another pet.  

One day my mom came home with a fluffy yellow duckling that had been abandoned and brought to the vet's office, where my mom had happened to stop on an errand.  He needed to find a home for it, so she took it off his hands.  It was enclosed in a cardboard box when she got home.  She told me she got something for me at the vet's office and had me guess what it was.  A duckling was the last thing I expected, so she finally opened the box for me to see for myself after I couldn't think of anything else to guess.

We named the little guy Duck Martin, after the trendy back shoes with yellow stitching, Doc Martins, that were the style then.  Since Duck Martin was yellow with beady black eyes, it seemed like a nice fit.

None of us knew how to determine the sex of a duck, and I guess we all just assumed that Martin was male since he had a male's name.  Silly, I know.  For some reason it never even occurred to me that Martin could in fact be Martina.  Until one morning, my brother ran into my room and woke me up, yelling, "Martin laid and egg, Martin laid and egg!"

I thought it was a joke.  It wasn't April Fool's, but I wouldn't have put it past my brother to play a joke on me.  Needless to say, I didn't believe it until I saw it with my own eyes; one large off-white egg.  Martin turned out to be a Pekin duck who laid eggs nearly every day.  We ate most of them.  That might sound gross to some, but they were actually better than a chicken egg in my opinion--the yolks were richer and creamier, the shells a lot thicker, and the egg as a whole larger.  Sometimes we wouldn't see Martin for a few days.  We'd finally find her "nesting" in our juniper bushes. Poor thing wanted to be a momma duck so bad.

We built her a small pond in our yard and for Christmas we'd buy her a bunch of ten-cent goldfish from Wal-mart.  She loved goldfish!  We would time her to see how fast she could eat them all.  She was like a goldfish vacuum.  

When we'd get the shovels out to do yard work, she was like Pavlov's dogs.  She'd come waddling as fast as she could to the side of us while we dug, so that she could eat any worms that came up with the soil.  We never had many spiders or creepy-crawlies while Martin was around, which wasn't long enough.

One hot July summer we came home from church and looked out the window.  Martin was laying on the grass under the trampoline, in a position that didn't look normal for a living duck. And it wasn't; she was dead.  We never did figure out what happened, though we had a few theories.

While she wasn't the typical pet that a child receives when they beg for a living creature, she was a good pet none-the-less (aside from her loud quacking in the wee hours of the morning).  Rest in peace Martina.