I never thought I would own a pig. Had anyone told me, even a few years ago, that this would be so, I would have laughed and said that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. So when my husband came home on that bright, spring day and said, "Hey, honey, you'll never guess what I brought home from Wal-mart!" I thought he was talking about a new set of tires for the pickup. 
 
We were new to country life, after years in the city, and I was trying hard to learn appreciation for the simple things in life. He gushed out the story of how he had seen a woman with a box sitting in front of the store. Thinking she was giving away free kittens, he went over to take a look. Now, my husband is normally a reasonable and intelligent man, but we had recently seen our youngest daughter leave home for college and the nest was empty. Maybe he was feeling especially lonely that day or maybe especially hungry, having visions of Christmas ham. I'm not sure which it was, but in any case, he didn't get away from Wal-mart that day without making us the proud owners of a potbellied pig. He paid $10 for this honor and was quite pleased with himself for doing so. I congratulated him, but I also had my doubts. 
 
My first reaction to Malcolm was one of delight and disbelief. Here was a tiny, little hoofed creature, about eight inches high, who when lifted out of the truck, set to squealing at a decibel level that I didn't even know existed. What a racket! They could easily use these animals to broadcast tornado warnings in the Midwest, or keep boats off rocky coastlines in foggy weather. We carried him into the house, deposited him on the bed, and breathed a sigh of relief, as he became quiet. 

I learned very quickly that quiet is not a relative term for pigs. They have a whole language of grunts, snorts, whines, and grumbles, and they are quick to let you know exactly how they feel about any situation. This little guy was letting us know, in no uncertain terms, that he was very displeased about being uprooted from his familiar surroundings and littermates, and someone was going to pay. He attacked the pillows with a vengeance, rooting and flinging them off the bed, then turned and glared at the two of us with a look that said "I'm the boss here now, and don't you forget it!" He was right. I knew from that moment that this pig had an attitude and was going to make a very interesting and challenging pet.
 
Malcolm's welcome inside the house didn't last long. He became tamer as we learned to love him, but he grew at an astonishing rate and proved himself worse than a 2-year-old about getting into things. Nothing was sacred. He shredded the newspaper, uprooted the potted plants, carried off my husband's socks, and finally gnawed my modem cord in two. That was the last straw. We found a nice abandoned doghouse that neighbors had left when they moved away, carried it home, built a pen around it, and Malcolm moved in.
 
Keeping him in that pen was quite another story. As well as being quite vocal, I learned that pigs are adept escape artists. He wasn't yet large enough to be contained by hog wire, as he could easily slip through the holes. He either broke through or dug under every other material we tried.
 
Some of my fondest memories of Malcolm are ones of watching my husband chase him through the neighborhood. He provided quite a bit of entertainment for me in those early days, and I'm sure my neighbors would agree that those chase scenes were the funniest and most exciting things we had seen up in these woods in quite a while. Malcolm, streaking down the road, with my husband in hot pursuit, soon became the major topic of conversation and the butt of all jokes on our street. This was not an event anyone could ignore, as the captured pig always rewarded his captor with the famous earsplitting squeal, and kept that up all the way home. If my husband happened to be away during the escape, the job of captor fell to me. I don't remember those times as being nearly as funny. My neighbors probably wouldn't agree. 
 
Spring turned to summer and we moved to a bigger house, right down the street. We took the doghouse, and Malcolm, squealing loudly as we stuffed him into the truck. I imagined I heard one of my less tolerant neighbors mutter a vehement, "good riddance" as we drove away. Any fantasies we might have had of the Christmas ham were long forgotten. He was a full-fledged family member by that time, and no matter how disobedient he may have been, we loved him like we had our own children as they went through those disagreeable teenage years. 
 
He would beg nicely for anything you would feed him, and would chortle appreciatively as he gobbled down his treats. He had refined his eating routine so well that he was no longer the cute, little 8-inch piglet, but now a half-grown hog, weighing about 50lbs.and no longer able to escape through the hog wire. He settled right in at the new place, and my husband and I tried to do the same. 
 
We were expecting our youngest daughter to move into that house with us and were very excited about the prospect. She was to attend the local community college, and we felt like the empty nest problem might be put on hold for a while. While a pig is a wonderful companion, we'd discovered raising one wasn't nearly as satisfying as raising a child. We missed the childish laughter, the never-ending questions that we could provide good answers for, and the huge rush of pride we received every time one of the children had done well and achieved a goal they had worked hard to accomplish.  
 
The excitement of the new house was short-lived. The daughter changed her mind at the last minute and decided to attend school elsewhere. We nursed our disappointment, continued to feed Malcolm, and life went on.
 
Summer turned to fall, and fall to winter. Malcolm tried his best to cheer us up in those days. He ate and he grew. He amused us when he got so large he split out the sides of the doghouse trying to get inside. He amused us when we replaced the doghouse with bales of hay that he would burrow into, with only his piggy tail sticking out. He amused us when we put on his favorite music and he would "sing" along. He would occasionally escape, just to keep us on our toes and keep our sense of humor intact. Yes, he tried very hard in those days to make things right, but there was something missing that even he, in all his pig glory, could not replace. My husband and I were both coming to the realization, after 22 years of living together and raising a family, that life would never again be as we had known it, and that the changes were making us different people. 
 
Malcolm was oblivious to the general unhappiness surrounding our family at that time. He worked on increasing his pig self-confidence, determined to become the most handsome potbellied pig specimen on the planet, and he worked on increasing his girth, not necessarily in that order. My husband and I bought him a pig harness from the Internet, thinking that it might be to our advantage to try and train him to behave civilly before he got too large. I think, symbolically, we were trying to harness and hold on to the familiar as it steadily slipped away from us. It was a wonderful concept, at least in our minds, but Malcolm wasn't buying it. He wasn't prepared to behave civilly, and certainly wasn't prepared to demean himself and wear that decidedly unpiglike attire. Getting him into it, turned into a test of wills, one that my husband and I soon conceded we had lost badly. We eventually recruited a local teenager, with much more experienced handling livestock than we, and asked him to put it on him. He snickered first, swaggered into the pen, wrestled Malcolm to the ground, and had that harness on him in less than 5 minutes. That was also about how long he wore it. He was a pig possessed as he tore around the pen, kicking up dust and rolling on the ground feverishly. He finally got the blasted thing off, heaving a great snort of satisfaction. He shot me that same glaring look that he had given me as a tiny piglet, but this time it said, "I'm still the boss, but I'm a BIG pig now. Don't try to make me anything else!" It was a time for giving up on things and accepting reality, so I listened. 
 
I only put that harness on Malcolm one more time, but this time it was in an apologetic fashion and followed by half a bag of Oreos. The season had changed to spring again and it was time to move on. I think he knew it and forgave me for humiliating him so. I whacked his fat, piggy butt all the way down the street, back to the old house to find myself. My husband went off in another direction to do the same.
 
Malcolm and I talk about lots of things these days and I'm glad I took the time to learn his language. A pig portrays great wisdom just by being a pig and loving it. Had I not taken the time to listen to him, I might have given in to the boredom and loneliness of the separation, taken on another relationship before I was ready, and missed his lessons entirely. He tells me daily it's okay to be anything, as long as you're comfortable with it and enjoy being that thing. He tells me that striving to become that thing or person is a quest that must be readdressed and reevaluated daily. He tells me to live with gusto and passion, as anything less, is not worth the effort.
 
He's a full-grown boar now, 125 lbs. and quite formidable. He gets surly when the wind doesn't blow his way and will bite when provoked, but I still love him. He still makes me laugh at his outrageous, pig antics and reassures me that acceptance is the key to life, helping you grow into who you need to be.
 
We get by. I feed him religiously, and he's satisfied that he's finally trained me to do that. I accept Malcolm and all his piggy ways, and he teaches me to accept myself. 
 
It's a fair trade.

I am a computer hardware specialist, and in my spare time, I work as a freelance writer. I live in the Sam Houston National Forest in Texas and operate from a home office. I enjoy my animals, a good story and being able to communicate and share with friends worldwide via the Internet. Raising a family, being a working Mom, and trying to develop myself as a person while doing that has given me a perspective on life that I would like to share with others. 
 
"Life with Malcolm" is my first story in quite a long time. It was inspired by a very dear pen-friend of mine. He enjoyed hearing about Malcolm and told me he thought others would like to hear his stories. Another pen-friend of mine pushed me to get it published after the story was written. So, I owe the satisfaction of seeing this in print to both those good friends and the power of this wonderful tool we call "the net". 
 
I have been published in the Houston Chronicle and JoyOnline e-zine.