Hamster Tragedy

Where have I been? Writing. Duh. Get off me ok? And listen to the following funny/tragic/off-the wall story I'm about to tell you.

A little background because you may find some of this free-write stuff on here in the future. I'm pursuing a Master's in Creative Writing in case you forgot, and my current instructor gives us writing exercises to get the juices flowing. She gave us the following topic and told us to write whatever came to mind and I thought this story was blog-worthy. It made me laugh to remember it. And cry a little bit. And feel a little bit of guilt.

My first pet.

As kids we had animals all the time on the farm, but I guess the hamsters we had qualify as “official” pets, right? Because we went to a pet store and stuff to buy them? Ok, yeah. 

Hamsters.

We had two. I guess my mom figured the three of us girls wouldn’t share one between us, so she got two. Well they were supposed to both be male. That’s what “Bill” said. (The name of the store was “Bills Pet Shop,” I’ve had this idea in my head of what “Bill” looks like for years now and I still don’t know if I’m right). But they weren’t both male. They were male AND female. And they made some babies. Lotsa babies. 

My mom took those babies back to Bill’s Pet Shop because she decided since Bill couldn’t tell whether a hamster was a boy or a girl, (which, frankly I can’t really understand either because if you’ve any experience with rodents, they have BIG nads if you know what I’m sayin’), they became his responsibility. She figured it was up to the pet store to take in homeless baby hamsters that resulted from gender negligence. Or so she told us anyway. I think she probably flushed them or something. My parents could be kind of… well… the kind of people who shot the dog if it barked too much.

But anyway, we were stuck with those two hamsters, a boy and a girl. And we had to figure out how to stop them from copulating because I think we could have probably kept Bill’s hamster stock regularly supplied if we’d allowed the promiscuity to continue. So somebody, my mom maybe, got some chicken wire and made a partition in the cage so each hamster had its own space.

Well the “cage” we had was really an old glass aquarium we had lying around so there was no top. We just jimmy-rigged that thing with a chicken-wire partition.

Now in the meantime we had re-named our two hamsters Bernard and Miss Bianca (you know from the Rescuer’s animated movie?). Originally, prior to the non-double-scrotum discovery, they were Bernard and Jake. Anyway, Bernard made short work of our chicken-wire partition by simply climbing over it. So that wasn’t going to work.

Then we built a chicken-wire top, (in addition to the partition to prevent climbing over it), and secured it somehow. I can’t remember how now because the memory turns a little tragic from here, so maybe I’ve blocked out certain key details that may or may not have implicated me in the ensuing tragedy.

Well, long story short, Bernard was so besotted by Miss Bianca that he attempted to squeeze his hamster body between the partition and top of the cage--I mean aquarium--and not able to fit more than just his head, he consequently hung himself. That’s how we found him in the morning. Tragic. I told you.

And so we buried him or something. And Miss Bianca, now husband-less, became our one and only pet (officially).

I guess we should have started out with one hamster to begin with.

Lesson’s learned:

Jimmy rigging is called that because Jimmy probably hung himself too on his own rigging.

Force your kids to learn to share just one pet, otherwise you might have a tried-and-true Romeo and Juliet story on your hands.