JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Big & Rich

And you sound like a fun guy.

Sorry to hear about your cousin.

You are not the only one with a frog story. I never giged one but I use to like to go down to the lake and catch them with my bare hands when we went on vacation. I would usually keep them in a big jar or covered cardboard box and let them go when we had to go home. Mom wouldn't let me have a pet frog and she told me that the long drive home would be too hot for the frog and that it would likely die. So I always let it go.

One summer while at my grandparents' cottage in Thunder Bay, Ontario, I caught a little baby frog while sitting at the dock looking at the lake with my sister. We named him 'Froggy'. It was late morning in early August and grandma was making lunch and told us to go down to the dock so we wouldn't bother her in the kitchen. It was an extremely HOT day.

I brought the frog with me back to the house and was looking for a box or a jar when grandma called us in for lunch. When she called you, you came right away or there would be Hell to Pay (like having to wash or dry the dishes).

She was making her famous cheeseburgers and we were both hungry. I decided to put old 'Froggy' under a small bowel on the picnic table while we ate and find a box for him after lunch. Unfortunately, for Froggy, the picnic table was directly under the HOT sun.

After lunch, me and sis forgot about old 'Froggy' and went on to do other things. She played with her Barbie dolls and I read my 'Ripley's Believe it of Not' comic books (the ones that would come three to a pack).

Before supper I went looking for my sister, who was still playing with her Barbies in the garage. One of us mentioned old Froggy and we both stared at each other like we were convicted murderers.

As we approached the picnic table, I kept asking her 'do you think he's OK?' She never answered me. When I took the bowl off Froggy all that remained was something that looked like a burnt strip of bacon. It was all charred and black. You could barely tell that it use to be a frog. My sister started crying and ran back into the house to tell grandma what I had done.

I was crying too and grandma realized that I didn't do it on purpose so she suggested that we have a funeral for him and pray that God would take him into Heaven, so that's what we decided to do.

Grandma also told me that God would forgive me but that it was important that I learned from what I had done and hopefully I would think the next time I did something like that. She told us that it wasn't really fair to the frogs to confine them that way and that we wouldn't like it if they did that to us.

I told her that I would never do that again and that I would take up smashing blood suckers with rocks instead. There were lots of those in the lake and grandpa told us not to let them get on our skin or they would suck all our blood. Grandma didn't seem to impressed.

The next morning, we had our funeral for Froggy and buried him in grandma's rose garden. We even made up an order of service. My sister told me that I would go to Hell for this and for the rest of the vacation I believed her.