Would you believe that I once had an alligator for a pet?? Well its true. When I was 7 yrs old we went to Fl to visit my Grandpa, and while we were there my Dad ordered 3 alligators to be shipped to our home in Ohio, but he never told us. One day they arrived at our house, one had died during the trip but we had two left. Now these gators were only about a foot long at the time we received them. My dad had a big metal thing that was used to mix concrete, and he turned it into an alligator pool.
One alligator was still weak from the trip, so my brother said that one was mine...little did he know that that one would live too. All the neighbors thought we were crazy. We played with them everyday..until they started to grow ..and they grew very fast. Soon we had two foot gators and their teeth were very sharp so we weren't allowed to handle them anymore. I still sat by the alligator pool and talked to my gator, even petting him once and a while, and he never tried to hurt me, but they didn't like my brother.
Soon they were 2 1/2 foot long and my folks were afraid we would get seriously hurt by them, so they gave them to the Cleveland Zoo. We never saw them again. I missed my gator friend.
When I was 44 yrs old, my husband who is also from Cleveland,Ohio and our family went back up there for a visit to our relitives who were still living there. We went back to my old neighborhood to see the house I lived in until I was 8 yrs old. The house looked just the same, We got out of the car because I wanted to see my old backyard and an elderly man came out and asked who we were. When I told him that I used to live in this house, he smiled and asked if he could ask me a question. Sure, I said. He told me that he had heard from neighbors that we had kept alligators there and didn't know if he should believe it or not. I laughed and pointed to the old alligator pool that was still there, and told him that it was true and that was their home. We all laughed together and he said that some of the neighbors who still lived there when we did often talked about the alligators who lived in Ohio.
I would never have believed that after all the years that had gone by that my old neighborhood would still be talking about my gators.
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