Okay, so a couple of months ago, Mom and I woke up the week
before little one's birthday, and thought "What are we going to get Avi
for her birthday?"
After a while deliberating, we realized that she had been
wanting a hamster (or some other equally furry critter) for about a year. And we had kept telling her no, since we had
the move coming up. Well, we had just
gotten to Japan, so the move was over.
And coincidentally one of the first stores we explored happened to also
have a pet section. Perfect.
So her birthday rolls around, and we let her open the
hamster house, and food, and shavings, and whatever else. So that weekend, Daddy and Avi are off to
Makeman to buy a hamster. Welcome home,
Cutie McFluffy. And there in, the story
begins its tragic downward spiral. It's
all fun and games, and every child in our 70 family building is crowded around
the cage non-stop. It's awesome. It's amazing.
In fact, I'm pretty sure in a poll of public opinion, Cutie can cure
cancer. We were trying our best to let
him acclimate, and not really letting him be handled or taken out of the cage
that week, to avoid being squished.
At the end of the week, it is time to clean the cage, and
change the litter. Alicia and Avi reach
into the cage to gently scoop him up, while the litter is changed. That’s about the time I get a frantic text, from
Alicia asking if hamsters can carry rabies.
After assuring her that they can't (Hey, shut up. Like you married folks don’t tell little
white lies to stay married!), I had her send me a picture of the bite, and
ensure that it was actually bleeding (which in my logic would imply a lesser
chance of "incoming" infection) and told her to wash it thoroughly
with soap and water, and to stop foaming at the mouth until I got home.
Notice to prospective
hamster parents, from Alicia:
Hamsters will NOT
sniff your hand sweetly and cautiously like a dog, to get friendly. They will instead, wiggle their whiskers,
luring you slowly closer, and then viciously attack, usually lunging straight
for the jugular. In the wild, they have
been known to leap to the neck level of grown men.
When I got home, everything was back as it should be. Except that no one wanted to play with the
hamster, and Alicia had taken to calling him "Killer". This went on for a few weeks, until things
settled down, everyone kind of forgot about the "attack". But the nickname stuck. So now, Cutie/Killer would get taken out for
his jaunts in the ball, and that still had the attraction value, but anything
else was rare.
Meanwhile, Alicia and I were the only ones who would now
clean the cage, as even Avi was a little reluctant to touch him. One night at bedtime, Alicia secretly
confided in me that she was secretly hoping he'd die, because she was the one
doing all the work, plus he stunk. This
was also about the time that Cutie had to be moved out of the girl's room
because he was keeping them awake. He
was notoriously nocturnal, but he had taken to the bad habit of gnawing on the
bars of his cage, stripping the cheap Chinese cage paint off the bars. She seemed concerned that it might not be
healthy. I just told her to relax, and
pointed out that he was probably just sharpening his "fangs" for the
next attack.
This was evidently the code word for "Fine, I will be
the one to change the cage litter out".
Because that’s what happened for a while. Gotta love being married to someone you love
to antagonize. Anyway, fast forward to
this morning…..
We wake up, and are making breakfast. I hear one of the girls exclaim "Awww look,
he got so tired eating he fell asleep in his food bowl"
Alicia promptly pulls me to the bedroom, with a worried look
on her face. "I think Killer
died".
"I doubt it, he's probably just asleep. He's fooled us before."
"No. He hasn't
moved since last night"
At this point, I gave her a look, and was questioning what
she might have finally gone and done….. but I realized she didn’t have it in
her.
So we go in, and I drop a drop of water on his nose, to see
if it wakes him up, and then we call Avi over, to explain what happened.
She cried for a couple of minutes, curled up on Momma's
lap. Then jumps up and walks to her
room.
Alicia has somewhere to be, but
while she's gone, I find a small cardboard box, and hand it to Avi, and explain
that she should decorate it, so we can use it for Cutie/Killer's funeral. It is at this point that I realized that not
only is she very much MY daughter, but she also is our "little boy"
at times.
As she is coloring and putting glitter on said box, she
explains to her sister that it's "Cutie's Death Box". Daddy goes in the other room to keep from
laughing. Avi keeps coloring and
applying glitter.
Once she is done, we go to put Cutie/Killer in the box, and
Avi yells to Alicia "Hey mom, now you can come pet him. He can’t bite you. He's dead!" This led to a floor wide petting party/wake
of said dead hamster. Somehow, no matter
how stiff a rigor mortised hamster gets, they are still fluffy and soft. This was quickly followed up by a floor wide
hand washing party. At which point Avi
comes back from the bathroom, and asks if now he might turn into a Zombie
Hamster, because "That would be kinda cool."
Both of us had to leave the room at that one, and that was
the moment that inspired this blog. But
I guess we shouldn’t have to worry too much about how she is handling
things. Her sense of humor has kicked in
for that.
So this afternoon, after a discussion on the merits of
burial at sea vs burial in the earth (Whew! I didn’t want to have to buy a
shovel just for this), it was official.
So Avi and Daddy walked down towards the ocean at the back of base. Unfortunately, the fence sits just shy of the
water by about 45ft due to the tide (SHIT!).
I make a comment that we'll have to go somewhere else, when I get a
"Duh!" look from Avi. I stop
for a second, and look back. "We
can still get him there, Dad."
"Baby, we can’t climb the fence. We'll go somewhere else"
"You can’t throw that far?"
"Are you sure we should do that honey?"
"Cutie won’t care.
He's dead!"
It took one good "are you sure look" before there
I was, standing next to my daughter, flinging a glitter covered box with a dead
hamster in it, over a 12 ft concertina wire topped fence. As we walked home from the beach, she stopped
skipping long enough to say:
"Dad, it seems like yesterday that we were bringing
Cutie home. Just you and I."
I was choking back a laugh, trying to count the time between
then and now, before she added:
"Because it was just a couple weeks, I think."
To quote Kenny Chesney…… That’s when I lost it!
In memory of Cutie "Killer" McFluffy Kotara
March 17, 2013 - July 15,
2013
(Don’t judge us!)
