Grad class, possums, and golden cockroaches

After I stopped teaching third grade, I thought my days of drama and thrill in the classroom were over. And while it's true that grad school classrooms lack the little adventures of elementary school like kids puking on textbooks or bursting into tears for no reason ("Sergio, why are you crying?" "I don't know!"), they're not completely devoid of excitement.

Last week's adventure started when one grad student announced to the professor that another student would be late because she was catching a possum. Yes, a possum. About 15 minutes later, in walked said student, carrying with her a banker's box emitting suspicious scratching sounds. "There's not a possum in there?" the professor asked. She said yes, there was, but it was just a baby. She perched the box precariously on top of a desk, and then our discussion of psychic space was suspended while we heard the story:

Apparently, animal control had come and removed a family of possums from campus, but they had forgotten this one lone baby. She saw it and knew it would die and decided that she could catch it and raise it as her own.

Now, I'm a compassionate person. I like animals (from a distance). I hate ending the life of even an ant. I went frog gigging once, but just the remembrance of that spear piercing the poor frog makes me shudder. As a child, the only way I could keep from crying when an adult killed a cockroach was by telling myself that murdered cockroaches would turn into pure gold and travel to their own special insect heaven. But possums, well, possums are just gross.

I mean, look at that.



I don't care if it's a cute tiny baby; it's still gonna grow into that disgusting creature. Possums are the type of animals you fight to keep out of your yard. I remember neighbors setting traps for possums. One took to standing on the edge of his yard and waving golf clubs at them. Armadillos may be responsible for leaving huge claw-sized holes in yards, but possums are the only greenbelt animal I can remember learning to hate.

And there we sat in class, trying to discuss Lacan and Foucault and the colonization of psychic space while this disgusting animal scratched and scurried and poked its whiskery nose out of the handles of the box. I don't think I can be faulted for not focusing much on our discussion.