by Julie Prince.
Zack was eight, and it was the only thing he wanted for Christmas. A hamster. A hamster…or a gerbil, or perhaps a guinea pig. Something in the rodent family that could be kept in a large tank or cage or habitat of some sort.
Rodents for Christmas, yay!!
Never been a huge fan, myself. I’d rather have a bull moose run across the room than a mouse. I’m serious. Not only would a bull moose not give me those shivery willies, but the chances are also pretty good I’d make the local papers. But Zack really, really wanted a little furry pet. And he’d wanted one for months so we knew it wasn’t a passing fancy. Peter and I talked about it and decided to go for it. Zack will be so excited! And what’s more, it will teach him responsibility! Blah, blah, blah…riiight. We said all those things you say when you get a kid a pet he promises to take care of and ends up leaving it up to you. Well at least, we reasoned, you didn’t have to walk one.
I decided the only rodent I could possibly go along with was a hamster. Guinea pigs are too big, and I just don’t get guinea pigs, anyway. First of all, they’re not pigs. And second, they don’t seem to interact with you much. They don’t scurry around and do cute things. They don’t run in a wheel. I mean, what’s the point? And gerbils. Gerbils look too much like mice. They have little squiggly tails—ew. “No tails,” Hamsters are cute, at least as far as rodents go. They’re fuzzy. They stand up on their hind legs and twitch their little noses and wring their little hands together like a worried shopkeeper. And—most importantly– they have no tail. I could deal with a hamster.
We decided we’d buy the tank first, and all the fixins’, and put that under the tree. Zack could open that; then I could take him to pick out his hamster the next day.
We ended up buying a multi-leveled construction. It had a wheel to run in, ladders to climb, plenty of corners to burrow in and a breakfast nook and a TV lounge! Zack, as predicted, was delighted when he tore the paper off the big box and he and Daddy Peter put it all together. Big sister Everett looked on placidly, perhaps wondering how her stupid little brother managed to be the one who received the coolest Christmas present that year.
A lot of hamsters in a pet store display case look like…
…a lot of hamsters.
“Look at them all in this tank!” There must have been at least fifteen. Scurrying around, eating, sleeping…
…Hey. That one in the corner. He IS sleeping, isn’t he?
“Look over here! Come over here and look at the teddy bear hamsters, Zack,” Everett ordered. “Everett, this is your brother’s Christmas present, not yours,” I reminded her. “Let him look around at all the hamsters and make his selection and…hey! These are cute! Zack! C’mon over here and take a look at these teddy bear hamsters your sister found!”
I’ll hand it to the pet store clerks. When Zack made his choice, it was time to call one over to get him out and put it into the hamster carrier for us. Yes, the hamster carrier. You don’t think you pluck these things out a tank and take them home in your jeans pocket do you? There was a rousing ten minutes of “That one…no…that one.” The clerk finally corralled the chosen one—that one, third from the right, next to that other one who is…errr…sleeping.
We bought him and took him home.
Now, I say “him.” Even the hamster book tells you it’s hard to tell a male from a female. Not to mention, this one was a half-sized hamster, which made all the little marks and distances between orifices even tougher to discern. But as we were getting only one, it didn’t really matter. There would be no danger of hanky-panky, no danger of girl fights or pissing contests. We just decided he would be a boy.
And Zack decided that he’d call him Teddy. Remember, it’s a teddy bear hamster. Zack was eight. What else would he call him?
“Handle your hamster frequently,” the book instructed. “Hamsters need to get used to your touch. Reach in there. Stroke them, handle them, feed them.”
Cute little half-sized Teddy let out a shriek, bared his tiny teeth and took a Kung Fu stance that would have struck fear into a back alley rat when I reached in to drop off a chunk of carrot. I snatched my hand back and took a quick count of my fingers. I called Peter’s office in a panic. “I can’t do this. He’s insane. He tries to bite me, his eyes bug out—he screams at me for Heaven’s Sake! ‘Linda Blair might be a better name for this thing; next his head’s going to start swiveling around!”
“Leave him be,” Peter suggested. “You fed him. Now leave him alone. Give him a few hours to get used to things.”
And, as Peter can sometimes be, (annoyingly) he was right. Teddy had a long afternoon nap, and that evening we all made our peace. Teddy was ready to get with the program.
We’d gotten him one of those plastic hamster balls. Zack would put him in there and Teddy would roll around and around, all over the living room.
Oh. Did I mention we had a cat?
But not to worry. Albert was the best-natured cat you’d ever want to meet. “A dog in a cat suit,” I liked to call him. And, at seventeen, Old Albert (or “Poor Old Albert,” as we’d taken to calling him,) was almost completely sedentary and absolutely stone deaf. He’d stretch out across the living room rug for most of the afternoon (and the better part of the morning and evening, as well). Teddy would bump into Albert and stand up on his haunches and wring his little shopkeeper hands and look at the massive wall of black fur he’d encountered.
And Albert never even noticed—not once. He never once turned his head and noticed the plastic globe or the ping-pong ball of a hamster inside of it. Nor did he ever realize that there was a luxurious rodent triplex in the living room on a surface just one medium-sized leap above him. The potential for feline-induced mayhem was definitely there. But not with Poor Old Albert. Poor Old Albert hadn’t leapt anywhere in a good couple of years.
Teddy didn’t go “upstairs” much in his deluxe condo. We had overdone it, much like first-time parents who get all the matching bedding and curtains, the frilly clothes, the fancy bottle sterilizers. But Teddy had simple tastes, and preferred life on the ground floor. Rocking occasionally, looking out at us, looking down at Albert, and gnawing busily on a carrot nub.
Zack waited for Teddy to use the wheel. “You don’t have to teach them that, do you?” I wondered aloud and flipped through the book. Teddy just didn’t seem to like the running-and-getting-nowhere game. He much preferred to sit up and face out the side toward us. He’d rock gently, back-and-forth, from side-to-side, sort of like Chubby Checker doing “The Twist.”
Then one morning, Teddy woke up lethargic.
Oh, C’MON, you HAD to know it was coming…
He sat there and looked at us, but over the next couple of days he didn’t eat much, and did very little boogying-down in his wheel. Zack kept picking him up and putting him back in there, and I had to tell him to let Teddy rest.
I noticed Teddy’s hind end was damp and brown. Back to the hamster bible I went. “Hmmm. ‘Wet Tail.’
Maybe…maybe not.” I hoped not. A diagnosis of Wet Tail would not bode well for Teddy.
Yes, a diagnosis, which meant a trip to the vet. And it was Wet Tail. Darn. The vet did give us a little hope, however. She thought Teddy looked pretty healthy otherwise, and she gave us some medicine in a teeny-tiny bottle with a teeny-tiny dropper to give Teddy a teeny-tiny dose twice a day.
“You paid sixty dollars to the vet for a four dollar hamster?” Peter asked when he got home from work that night.
“Yes. I paid sixty dollars to the vet for your son’s four dollar hamster. What of it…??”
“Uhh…Nothing. Just want to be sure you recorded it in the checkbook.”
I’m here to tell you, it’s hard to dose a hamster—and I’ve wormed horses, for Pete’s Sake. But I did it, and we tried to convince ourselves Teddy was improving; tried to imagine he was putting on some weight. But we all knew you could feel those tiny ribs more and more each day. We tried to convince ourselves we saw more of a spring in Teddy’s step. But we could all see he was sleeping more and more.
Zack ceased to be upset after a few days and soon after that, he stopped playing into the charade altogether; stopped paying attention to Teddy at all. I’d gingerly lift Teddy out of his home, give him his medicine and a little stroke, and Zack would walk by without a second glance and head to his video game.
A heartless little boy? Far from it. An eight year old who was experiencing the first loss in his life he would remember. An eight year old who couldn’t bring himself to think about it too hard and whose defense mechanism had kicked in.
Zack was invited to a friend’s house for the weekend, and we let him go. I went a long-scheduled girls’ weekend at the beach.
Peter called that Saturday night to tell me about Teddy. Finally. The poor little thing. “Don’t tell Zack until he gets back tomorrow,” I instructed. “No sense upsetting him while he’s at his friend’s house.” I cried for a couple of minutes myself, then poured another glass of Chardonnay and rejoined the girls.
Peter and Everett buried Teddy in the back of the building. Peter said she was a big help.
And Everett was the one who broke the news to Zack when he got home the next day. “He took it pretty well,”
Peter said. It wasn’t unexpected after all. But sad, all the same. We got a real emotional workout for our money.
It was four dollars very well-spent.