Cousin Grover

Grover gets excited over little things; I once witnessed him in a dairy barn, fascinated by the moving cowshit as the gutter cleaner was working. He would encourage the moving shit and shout: "yay!" and clap and bounce up and down as the contents of the gutter past him by. If Grover was an animal he would be a cockroach crossed with a rat; he is a survivor in every sense of the word. He spent his youth in an isolated, mountainous region of Vermont. He was left to his own devices to raise himself and procure food. I remember visiting him as a child and being shocked at the life he had to live. When we were all under 12 years old, my family went to visit Grover's family in Vermont (my father and Grover's father are brothers). We arrived early one morning and were set loose in the bush. Grover was rooting through the shed and gathering lengths of rope and some pieces of plywood, his parents didn't really notice what he was doing. He then quickly disappeared into the woods, and with a sense of urgency beckoned that my brother and I follow. We walked down a creek for a mile and came to a small pond; Grover's older brother Chrissy had been on a crayfish hunt and become lodged up to the waist in thick, quick-sand like mud. He was gently weeping when we reached him, he had a crawdad in each hand that he would not give up seeing as it was supper. Grover placed the plywood on the mud and walked out to his brother, he then roped Chrissy and extracted his frail body. Chrissy and Grover lived almost exclusively on a diet of crayfish, trout, ritz crackers, bird eggs and various tabocco products (Grover started smoking when he was in grade 2). Many times when food was scarce, Grover got through it by licking a salt-shaker. My brother and I were unaccustomed to such a lifestyle; my mother used to cut up our steak and put sugar on our cereal until we were finished high school.
When Grover growed up he lived in some kind of apartment in Montreal. The only food he had there was a huge bail of dry soup mix that he shared with the mice. His only heat source for the winter was the clothes dryer. I didn't visit him much when he was living there.
In his early twenties Grover was hit by a car and thrown 25 feet. He almost died, but the rat in him wouldn't allow it. His knee and a few of the less important vertebrae in his neck were broken. His bones make audible creaking and crunching noises when he moves now.
Grover recently went crazy due an abnormal amount of personal problems and stress. He was officially diagnosed by a nut doctor; it was accute adjustment disorder or something like that. He had to be heavily medicated for a few months. During this time of treatement he refered to himself as TDI (The Drooling Idiot) because one of his pills had that exact effect on him. Quite interestingly Grover's car is also a TDI Jetta. Grover went to my parents farm to convalesce. His self-prescribed therapy included playing in the mud with sticks, eating jello, kicking dogs and yelling at imagined enemies. Grover also staved off glaucoma for the rest of his life during this hiatis. Grover's behaviour hasn't really changed all that much since he went nutty; I notice that he buzzes, chirps and twitches a little more than usual, but apart from that he is pretty much the same.
Grover is a self professed minimalist when it comes to personal hygeine. He has an awful fear of soap and water and has been known to go for many, many moons without engaging in any kind of warshing.

Some highlights of Grover's life include:
- Getting raped by a tornadoe while tree planting in BC.
- Living with my brother in the back of a pickup for an entire summer.
- Loving two cousins at once.

Little known facts about the Grover:
- Grover dumpster dives to feed himself when necessary.
- Road kill examination and catalogueing is one of his hobbies.
- Grover laughs to the point of tears at the dead people in every cemetary he sees.
- During his employment at Parc Safari Grover could not keep up to the ladies who desired to bed him.
- Grover kicks any living thing that is smaller than him and laughs.
- Grover almost died when he was force fed a bottle of Jim Beam through a road cone when he was passed out on the floor.
- Grover suffered 3rd degree burns when he fell asleep on a woodstove by accident.
- Grover regularly collects and mails his toenail clippings to certain colleagues, friends and institutions.

Grover still has a taste for wild bird eggs that lingers from his youth.


Grover's prefered method of warsh time is to get the dirt scraped off his foul hide with an ice scraper. No soap. No water. He says it feels tickly.