Capers With Carroll

With the wedding and honeymoon over, this week my daughter and my new son-in-law are visiting with us before they return to their home in Brazil. He is working on his English, and I am slowly picking up a little Portuguese. For example, I am now his sogro, and he is now my genro, except that the ‘r’ is pronounced like an ‘h’, and the initial ‘g’ is pronounced like a ‘zh’.

So far, meu genro has put up with a lot of strange things from seu sogro, but yesterday his curiosity reached a threshold. What good—he wondered—is a pet tarantula that hardly ever moves?

Well, on one level, Farrah is a holdover pet from my last classroom, as is Piume the Red-Eared Slider, who was originally my daughter’s before she moved to Brazil. On another level, Farrah is a living pun. Tarantulas make up the family Theraphosidae, and the common California tarantula is Theraphosa aphonopelma. Theraphosa sounds so much like Farrah Fawcett, and both are covered by such beautiful hair, that for a pun lover like myself, Farrah can move at glacial speed around her cage and still be worth every cricket or beetle I toss her.

However, for the benefit of meu genro, we brought Farrah out for a walk. At this point, I think he was quite satisfied with her glacial speed.