The Tokay Gecko Versus the Vietnam Veteran

Tales From the Pet Shop

When I was in my late teens, I went off to dog grooming school, graduated, and got a job as a groomer in the back of Pet Palace. The year was 1988 and I was eager to start building my business and embrace my new career path.

In those early days, I didn’t have many customers to start and so Roger, the owner of Pet Palace, gave me some shifts in the pet shop to help me make ends meet while I built my clientele.

Managing the store, was a rather quirky and unique middle-aged dude named Harold. Now Harold was a veteran who used to regale his young coworkers with tales of serving in the Canadian Armed Forces in Vietnam. To this day, I will never forget the horror of some of what he relayed. I’d never met anyone like Harold before.

No doubt, because of what he had lived through, he had a wry, almost sardonic sense of humour. Whenever he told a story, whether it be of the horrors of war or of something funny and unbelievable that happened to him, he’d plaster a toothy grin on his face and kind of vibrate as he told his tale, almost always following it up with “What a rush!” I took an instant liking to this unusual man, and we built a fast friendship in spite of our age difference.

Life in the pet store was the highlight of my life at the time. Dog grooming was hard, physical labour but working with Harold was extremely entertaining. We’d find reasons to laugh at everything: the antics and quirks of not only the animals we were entrusted to care for and sell, but also those of the customers, the suppliers, and people we knew in the industry. Trust me, you meet a lot of “interesting” people in the pet trade.

In the moments between customers and discussing our pet shop tasks, Harold and I would take every opportunity to shoot the breeze and make each other laugh. It made the days go by so much quicker. One day, Harold came to me and told me that some months before, when he had received a shipment of small lizards, one of them had slipped away from him and scurried off into the darker regions of the pet store.

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