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One of my favorite memories of Harriet was when John Edward, the psychic medium, came to the zoo. He found out almost by accident that he could read living animals. Everything Harriet communicated to him was absolutely spot-on.
Although John hadn’t been to the zoo before, Harriet told him that she used to be in another enclosure and that she liked this one better. That made sense because her current enclosure was bigger. Harriet also said that she liked the keeper with an accent, but it wasn’t Australian or American. John was having trouble placing the accent, and then he met Jan, who was English. “That’s the accent,” he said. Turns out Jan had been taking care of Harriet since before I had ever visited the zoo. John also said that Harriet had had blood drawn from her tail--which was correct, since we’d done a DNA profile on her.
One thing, though, John had wrong. “Harriet misses her blanket,” he said.
“You know, John,” I said, “Harriet can’t have a blanket, because she tries to eat everything.”
“She misses her blanket,” John politely insisted.
After he left the zoo, I asked Steve about it. “Did Harriet ever have a blanket?”
Steve laughed. “Nah, mate, she’d have just eaten it.”
Weeks went by. I visited Steve’s dad, Bob, and told him about everything John Edward had said, right up to the blanket. “He was spot-on until he got to the blanket,” I said.
Bob’s face widened with a big grin. “Actually, back in the eighties,” he said, “a woman knitted a blanket for Harriet. On cold nights, before we had given Harriet a heat lamp, we would put the blanket over her shell, hoping that it would help contain some of her heat during the night.”
I laughed. I couldn’t believe it. Bob said, “Harriet had that blanket for weeks and weeks, until one day she tried to eat it. Then we had to take it away.
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