This Fourth of July, social media was abuzz with fireworks complaints — not due to parents bemoaning the awakening of sleeping babies, but from pet owners upset by how their dogs had been scarred by the noise.

All the chatter got me thinking about how my husband and I don't have any pets, nor do we have any plans or desire to get one.

We're a non-pet house, a rarity these days, with rates of pet ownership eclipsing the rates of people with children in their homes. Our kids occasionally mention pets, but thus far, we've resisted. For one reason, look no further than the tangled and bizarre history of pets in my household growing up.

The first pets I remember having were fish, and I remember them chiefly because of an incident in which my 4-year-old brother smashed our fish tank with a toy mallet, sending sprays of saltwater and tropical sea creatures out over our living room carpet.

"The fish are dying!" I wailed to my parents as they frantically scooped the fish into soup cans and cups full of tap water.

As a child, I pitied the fish. As an adult, I pity the parents.

The fish were followed by an exotic bird my dad got after a job on an oil freighter. When he repaired their generator, the Brazilian sailors must have paid their bill at least partially in parrot, for my dad came home that day with a wide grin and the most beautiful bird I'd ever seen.

The parrot was colorful both in its plumage and its language, we learned, after our efforts to teach it to say "hello" and "pretty birdie" were met solely by a stubborn fusillade of Portuguese curses.

When we asked my dad what the bird was screaming, he just grunted and refused to translate.

The bird also bit, and after it nipped my hand particularly hard one day, my dad sold the parrot for hundreds of dollars to someone who was either extremely foolish or a South American swear word aficionado with fingers made of steel.

The next pets to cycle in were a pair of gerbils that my parents had been assured were both male but, as we soon learned, were not.

Some very natural but still very horrible things happened quickly thereafter, as the gerbils displayed both the rapidity of their gestational cycle and a willingness to continue breeding despite the preexistence of multiple litters of nursing young. After the third round of back-to-back procreation, my dad separated the gerbil parents into nearby cages.

The male, in an admirable display of devotion to the furthering of his species, chewed through the side of his cage to reach the female. After that, the gerbils disappeared, and we got a rabbit. A single rabbit.

She was a snow-white female, and instead of pooping her delicate little ball-droppings out onto the ground, she conveniently used a litterbox. For a time, it seemed, she would be our perfect pet.

But the rabbit didn't like people, and whenever I tried to cuddle it, I'd feel its little heart hammering away inside its chest. One day, the rabbit ran out of an open door, throwing her fate to the wind rather than face the further affections of an 8-year-old human.

At that point, my parents gave up, and the rabbit was succeeded by a revolving door of cats from the pound. There was a Siamese kitten whose cruelty was exceeded only by its unrelenting diarrhea, and two cats so unremarkable we resorted to simply calling them "Black Cat" and "Gray Cat."

Throughout the Great Pet Experiment, we had one perfect pet: a gray tabby named Pebbles.

But the Pebbles of the world are rare, like hitting a pet jackpot, and for now, I'm not ready to play the odds.

Instead, I'll sit back and watch all of you, you brave pet owners who've gambled, and consider the day when we might deal ourselves in.

I'll just make sure to brush up on my Portuguese first.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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