I discovered him one evening on my return home from work. There he was, fussing and scratching around my little converted garage on Inman Street. At first I thought he was a rat, so I quickly opened the french doors to the brick patio to give him an escape hatch, then I went on the offense, charging right at him. But he didn't behave as expected. He didn't run away or defend himself like a standard rat. He didn't do anything, he just froze right there in the corner looking pretty much like a dead rat, or so it seemed to me.
My first thought was that I'd given the rat a heart attack and he'd expired on the spot. In hindsight it's easy to say that I should have recognized his behavior as playing possum, the characteristic evasive strategy of these harmless little... errr... marsupials? But I'd never knowingly met a real possum or opossum and didn't know that they closely resemble giant rats. (The tail of your common American opossum is particularly rat-like.)
The death act was disconcerting, but I wasn't persuaded and looked around frantically for some sort of missile or bludgeon to ratchet my program for this intruder to the next level. Finding nothing more appropriate than my shiny new vaccuum cleaner, I grabbed it and hurled it at the rat, a violent transgression for which I was instantly punished by the complete destruction of the expensive plastic gadget. Fortunately, I had missed. The rat/possum just continued lying there with no apparent damage apart from the fact that he wasn't moving. (The ability of the possum/opossum to play possum is really impressive.)
At this point, I paused for a moment to reconnoiter the situation, and after some deep thought, the truth finally dawned. I understood that I was dealing with a possum and not a rat. After that important realization, I managed to coax the poor traumatized animal into a cardboard box and carry him out to the patio and release him, where he sniffed momentarily at my habachi to show he wasn't afraid, then trundled off into the bushes, never to return.
I was just completely unfamiliar with possums—or—that is, possums other than Pogo, who is a towering giant among your more literate class of cartoon possums, and is also an old acquaintance with whom I am on intimate terms, having read him since before I knew how to decipher the scribbled characters in those little speech balloons. Pogo and I go way back, but this real-world interloper looked nothing at all like Walt Kelly's creation.
Pogo, Churchy Lafemme, Albert, Miz Beaver and those pesky CIA weasels, etc., are as familiar to me as the members of my own family and probably more so. If I'd known that my real-life visitor was of the order of Didelphimorphia I would have invited him for coffee and popovers and generally treated him like a lost brother. But when I mention Pogo to people around here, nobody knows what I'm talking about.
Walt Kelly was possibly the greatest american artist of the latter twentieth century. It's not an exaggeration to say that Pogo's satirical books and newspaper funnies helped in a substantial way to defeat McCarthyism in the mid nineteen-fifties. My eagerness to decode Pogo's conversations with his fellow Okefenokeeans motivated me to learn to read, and probably helped prepare me for the contradictions and follies of adult life in this swampy world and for the absurdity of our attempts at governance. From my obsessive reading of Pogo I acquired an appreciation for divine nonsense, and those books (of which there are many) might even be the reason I'm not helpless with Asperger's syndrome, or something. Yet the name of Pogo's creator is now already forgotten and his grave obscured with the dust of ages, despite which regrettable fact there might be some people around who can still recall the following immortal phrase:
I certainly hope so, since it's the big lesson of our epoch.
