(Note: Because my father has expressly forbidden me from sharing any stories involving himself and his pet monkeys, I want to stress that the following post is entirely fictional, and any resemblance between the characters depicted herein and my parents or their pet monkeys is just a shocking, shocking coincidence. What are the odds?)
When I decided to attend Wharton, I didn’t spend much time thinking about the fact that I would be a University of Pennsylvania graduate student. Honestly, it barely occurred to me. But the rest of my family took notice.
“You’re the third generation of Penn student in your family,” my grandmother told me. “Not everyone can say that.” Yes, grandma, that’s true. That is something that not everyone can say.
But as uninterested as I was and still am in carrying on some sort of Penn family tradition, grandma was right. Her husband, my grandfather, had attended Penn as an undergraduate, although he never earned a degree. Instead, he left after three years and went straight to medical school. After becoming a doctor, he enlisted to serve in World War II. I don’t think he ever saw combat, although I do know he was sent overseas. A fluent German speaker, he attended the trials at Nuremberg.
Both my parents went to Penn, where they met and got engaged. Given that they were students during the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Summer of Love, you’d think they’d have some pretty good stories from their college days. And, for the most part, you’d be wrong. It’s very possible, even likely, that mom and dad are holding out on me, but most of their reminiscences seem to involve the old deli where they used to eat their lunches, the old laundromat where they used to wash their clothes, the old fight songs they used to sing at football games, the old study hall where…
This is not to say that my parents don’t have any interesting college stories. In fact, they have a wealth of them, every single one involving monkeys. For a few brief, magical years, my parents were monkey owners — they had three of them over the course of their monkey-owning career — until they finally and unwisely traded them in for a couple of children.
Their first live-in simians, a pair of yellow squirrel monkeys named Emmett and Greg —
(A brief digression on Stein family pet names: it strikes some people as odd that my parents would name their monkeys Emmett and Greg, just as it strikes some people as odd that our family dogs have been named, in order of appearance, Casper, Willy, and George. I assure you that the Stein family finds it even more odd that some people give their animals idiotic pet names like Fido, Spot, and Bonzo. We’ve never discussed the matter amongst ourselves; we all just intuitively understand the fundamental rightness of giving pets normal people names, and we will get rather indignant on the issue if pressed.)
— were terrible pets, and I’ve never heard my parents express the slightest sentimentality toward either one of them. They were dirty and smelly, my mother assures me, and worse, they were constantly (here I quote) “blowing each other.” Now, this was the late ’60s, and Emmett and Greg surely had a right to their own lifestyle choices, but you have to admit that this is not very attractive behavior in a pet. Imagine my poor parents trying to throw a dinner party for a professor while their two pet monkeys engage in acrobatic monkey sex on top of the credenza. Savor the image as I have.
So my parents decided to get rid of Emmett and Greg. Getting rid of two monkeys is not the easiest thing in the world to do. You can’t just flush a monkey, or drop a monkey off at the pound. Faced with this dilemma, mom and dad stood a while in the hallway, whispering to one another in low voices and casting furtive glances at Emmett and Greg, who, unaware of my parents’ sinister intentions, continued merrily highlighting their favorite passages in the Kama Sutra and occasionally buggering one another behind the TV. Finally, a plan was hatched, a plan of such diabolical simplicity that it still, to this day, takes my breath away. Here’s what my parents decided to do: they set Emmett and Greg free.
Yes, that’s right. My parents turned two yellow squirrel monkeys loose in the “wild”. The details here are a little hazy, and I do sometimes wonder if “turning them loose” means executing them gangland-style in the New Jersey wetlands. But according to the official version of the story, the monkeys were thrown over the wall of a Busch Gardens wildlife preserve in Tampa, where, for all I know, they continue to live today, practicing deep tissue massage under the shade of a Florida palm.
Coming soon: meet Cecil.
