Pets, pt. 2

A few posts back, Amanda commented that she wanted to hear the rest of the story about how Mollie came to be our dog. I believe I left off somewhere after either Charlie the guinea pig or Charlie the tortoise met their ignominious ends at the fate of the "clown who lives down the street."

I had no pets, save for fish, after the tortoise. I did have quite a little colony of guppies at one point, though - which was really great until I went to Hawaii with my parents in 1978 and brought home some coral that I plunked into my tank...coral that, unbeknownst to me, harbored some sort of killer parasites, that managed to completely wipe out my guppy population.

For my tenth birthday, I got a hamster, which is a bit like having a hyperactive guinea pig. My first hamster was named Brownie, because, well, he was brown. (Cut some slack - I was ten). He was actually quite cool - he would sit on my shoulder as I walked around the house, occasionally crawling across my neck to sit on the opposite shoulder. Now, hamsters have a tendancy to pee at the drop of a hat, so I even had little Brownie trained that way: whenever I took him from his Habitrail, I'd promptly plunk him into one of the bathroom sinks, at which point he'd sniff around for a moment or two, then aim his bottom at the drain, and pee. Then I knew he'd be okay to carry around.

He was a good little hamster - I remember him escaping from his cage once, and spending the entire day, racking with sobs, trying to find him, only to discover an outlet box for a TV antenna cable that had the cover plate hanging wide open by only one screw - certainly an inviting place for a small rodent. I cried so hard that my mother remarked that she didn't think I would cry that much if she died, which of course made me cry even harder.

My dad came up with the idea of how to find him - we put a small food bowl with four food pellets in it at the landing at the base of the steps on the first floor, and did the same at the top of the stairs. The next morning (the day I was going to Disneyland with my best friend Stan, by the way), I found two pellets missing from the downstairs bowl and all four gone from the one upstairs. The crafty little bugger was making it up and down the stairs. Not bad for a little animal that measured no more than five inches.

Brownie died sometime toward the end of sixth grade. I can recall the day it happened. I knew the end was near, as he'd been going downhill for a few weeks. I remember taking him out of his cage, and him actually crawling up next to me and laying down - I'm guessing an instinctive need to get warm, but I still found it very moving. I went to work on a school project with a girl I had one of my first crushes on (Stacey Hawthorne), and coming home to find him dead.

Brownie was replaced by Sherman, who didn't have near the personality or intelligence of my first hamster. I also seem to recall vaguely thinking that he should never have been named "Sherman," either - he seemed to lack a certain, uh, chromosome - one that's rather hard to detect on a five-inch-long animal.

Getting late, more tomorrow.