Pet Penguin

It had nothing to do with the plot, but I was fascinated by the warm weather breed pet penguin in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Not that I actually wanted one for myself. Domestication of wild animals for pets is ethically questionable at best, plus birds are messy. But many years after watching Evangelion, I found myself in possession of a penguin for a short time.

I was at a music festival in Iceland. Intending to take a nap before dinner so we’d have energy to stay up for the late bands, we headed back to the tent. But like the three bears, we found a Goldilocks in a penguin suit sound asleep headfirst in my husband’s bag.

We couldn’t just leave him there for fear of him vomiting in our tent. But we couldn’t wake him. So we called on our neighbors for help. With a person on each ankle and one to hold the bag, we extricated the squatter from our tent and roused him to semicoherence.

Giant Penguin

The tall Icelandic youth wearing a penguin suit had drunk too much and gone to sleep it off, but was unable to locate his friends’ tent. Despite teasing about maternal instincts from the neighbors, I felt nervous just sending him on his way. So I walked him back to the festival lost and found.

We chatted along the way. I was impressed that he spoke English so well when he could barely remain upright and was obviously trying to deal with pants that had fallen down inside his suit. But he said, “Yeah, but I couldn’t do higher maths now.”

I told the ladies at the lost and found that I wanted to turn in a lost child. They were a bit bemused, that never having happened before at an 18+ festival, and the penguin took mild offense. He was, after all, more than a foot taller than me.

“Child?” he protested.

“Well, you are wandering around lost in fuzzy pajamas.”

I left him sitting on a chair nearby once the festival volunteers agreed to keep an eye on him until his friends showed up or he remembered where he was camping.

It turned out that he was only off by a couple of tents, so we ran into each other several times that weekend and got to be friends a bit for the duration of the festival. But I won’t share his name or any of the interesting details of his life. After all, he’s probably all grown up by now.