The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery Page A

seldom saw them. The friends with whom we spent the most time were older, their children grown—or they were child-free like us. Writing, as we did, for adult readers didn’t bring us in contact with many kids; our civic duties (I served on the conservation commission and as a deaconess at church, and Howard chaired the library’s board of trustees) didn’t, either.
    Which was fine with me. I’d never been one of those people who was “good with kids”—not even when I was a kid myself.
    My childhood playmates were mainly adult. Our Scottish terrier, Molly, and I had been pups together, but all the others—the parakeets and box turtles, fish and lizards—were grown when I met them. As for young humans, I knew little about them. When we’d lived at Fort Hamilton, I didn’t go to school with the other kids on base. Weekdays I rode into Brooklyn in a limousine to Packer Collegiate Institute, a private Protestant school with huge brass banisters coiling alongside curving wooden staircases, teachers who yelled if you put your elbows on the lunch table, and an hour of chapel every morning. My classmates lived too far away to play with regularly on weekends, and no kid on base wanted to play with the general’s daughter.
    But no matter. Outside, I didn’t
want
to play kickball in the street, anyway; I wanted to walk with Molly and see what she was smelling. Indoors, I didn’t
want
to play with other girls and their silly dolls; I preferred the prehistoric inhabitants of Purplenoiseville, a dinosaur village ruled by a battery-powered foot-tall purple and green tyrannosaur named King Zor, who rolled forward spitting sparks and rubber-tipped darts to keep the smaller brontosaurs, ankylosaurs, and ceratopsians in line. The dinosaurs were surprisingly devoted. Purplenoiseville had been settled when I was four and we lived in Alexandria, Virginia; I’d assumed that when we moved, since we couldn’t take Alexandria with us, we couldn’t take Purplenoiseville either. But one day shortly after the move to Fort Hamilton, the doorbell rang and I opened the door to find King Zor waiting on the doorstep. In the coming days, I would breathlessly report to my parents how, one by one, all the dinosaurs appeared, having journeyed all the way from Virginia to New York. If anyone had asked me at the time, I would have said I had plenty of friends.
    By fifth grade, when my father retired from the Army and we moved to New Jersey, I was earning straight A’s, had memorized the Methodist hymnal, and read French and English at a high school level. But I had no idea how to play with children. A quarter century later, I still hadn’t learned.
    But Christopher Hogwood changed everything.
    Â 
    F ROM THE FIRST DAY THE C ABOTS MOVED IN THAT JANUARY, A white, five-gallon plastic ice cream bucket dominated their kitchen counter. This was the slops bucket, the focus of every meal.
    â€œOooh—pasta!” the girls would cry in delight on a night Lilla made spaghetti. “Christopher would really like that!” The girls would eat just the tiniest bit for dinner in order to leave more for the pig’s enjoyment.
    â€œBagels! Great!” they would exclaim at breakfast, making sure there were plenty of leftovers for the pig. At their house, burned cookies were cause for rejoicing, and when one day a whole watermelon splattered on the floor, the fallen fruit was greeted with a whoop of pleasure, as if a skilled basketball player had landed a slam-dunk…right into Christopher’s pen.
    When the family had moved in, I had told them to feel free to bring treats for Chris at any time, but to make sure to come see me first. Possibly Lilla thought this was a neighborly gesture to ensure her small daughters were not stepped on or bitten by an enormous hog. This was not the case. Actually my main concern was that no one fed Christopher anything unsavory. (People new to