ABSTRACT
When I was fourteen I, through a series of circumstances that could be its own chapter in another book, ended up alone for a few hours in the house of some people I didn’t know in far-away Kansas City the day before Christmas Eve, rather than in my rural Minnesota home with my family (I’d have to write the whole story as fiction because nobody would believe it). The home owners had a large glass tank with a ten-foot python in it. I looked at it, and when it looked back at me I realized just how small and tender (like veal) a boy of my age was. After the residents (honest to God, the guy’s name was Monty) returned home and we were eating frozen bananas together (seriously), we had a few questions for each other. I was surprised when I learned that the word “python” refers to a whole family of snakes, not just a single species. I’m not much of a snake expert myself, so I did a little research on pythons. What I found out is that there are twelve recognized species of python. I remembered learning when I was very young that pythons don’t have venomous fangs. I wondered if they had teeth, but thankfully the python that night didn’t offer to show me his open mouth.
