Three things any random boy growing up in the 1970’s South would likely hold dear:
- A baseball glove kept under his pillow wrapped in rubber bands around a baseball to help break it in.
- A pocket full of marbles.
- A rolled-up comic book poking out from his back pocket.
On the back page of the comic book was often an advertisement for some of the strangest items ever cooked up to separate a kid from his hard-earned chore money.
I certainly bought my share of this junk.
At various times in my childhood, I owned X-Ray specs, an ant farm, the Charles Atlas system for making a man out of a 97-pound weakling, and a brood of sea monkeys.
You may find this hard to believe now, but in the days of my youth, you could actually order “A Darling Pet Monkey” by cutting out the attached form and coughing up $18.95.
That was out of my price range, but I always wanted one of those monkeys. Later, I read they were imported squirrel monkeys from South America and mean as hell. Terrible pets!
Not so the sea monkey.
The ads made sea monkeys sound like the perfect pet. They needed almost no care. They just swam around in their little plastic aquariums all day. It was even promised you could train your sea monkeys to perform tricks.
I think the end of my own Age of Innocence started with those sea monkeys.
The ad in the comic book made them look like frolicking little sea elves just waiting for you to come and play.
In reality, you could barely see the little creatures, which are actually brine shrimp. They maxed out at about a quarter of an inch long, were basically translucent, and resembled a monkey about as much as I look like a Turkish ham sandwich.
Mine never did any tricks or did much of anything the ads promised.
I soon grew tired of them.
Many, many years later, on a tour of a salt-making facility in Southern Portugal, where salt is made from the sea by the process of concentrating and distilling sea water, I learned that brine shrimp inhabited the salt pans.
They say the value of travel is in the new things you learn.
That day, standing at the tip of the Iberian Peninsula, I learned that my sea monkeys might have spoken Portuguese.
No wonder I couldn’t train them to do a dang trick.
I don’t speak Portuguese.