Cats are the most spiteful of the animal kingdom. We left for one lousy night this weekend. To teach us a lesson the cat decided to disappear for two days. Damn if I didn’t welcome him with open arms when he came meowing at the back door last night. I have always been a hangers on. I had a hamster that died when I was sevenish. He or she was my third or fourth hamster. I say he or she because I could never tell and when it came to naming my animals it really didn’t matter much. You are, after all, reading the girl who wanted to name her Schnauzer “Bosley John Bosley” after the character on Charlie’s Angels (the television show not the movie). The first couple of hamsters ended up becoming meow mix to our cat Lookie. This one however died a natural death. Not wanting to give up its memory too soon I took an empty check box of my mother’s and placed in neatly on a bed of toilet tissue. Dignified, I know. Because my mother refused to allow me to keep dead animals in the house, I was forced to find weatherproof lodging outside. The barbeque pit was the chosen spot for his/her tiny hamster mausoleum. My parents tried desperately to get me to agree to a proper burial but I was having nothing of it because quite frankly (the weak of heart should turn away now) I enjoyed going to the barbeque pit, opening the box, seeing his progress, and occasionally giving him the encouraging pat on the side. For those of you who know me it is no surprise that in our house I am in charge of dead animal disposal while my partner is in charge of insect disposal. Had my hamster had even a single visible bug on his/her decomposing body I would have buried him in an instant.
One day my mother had a friend over. They sat in the living room gossiping, complaining, and laughing. Not one to be ignored and void of many friends I asked my mother’s friend if she would like to see my hamster. Neither was paying attention and her friend absently said “Sure.” So out I went to the patio to retrieve him/her. I opened the box to show my mother’s friend who was quite frightened and sickened all at once. My mother was mortified.
When my father came home she demanded he convince me to get rid of the hamster. He walked me to the parking lot, check box in hand pointed to the big white dumpster in the complex parking lot and said “You know the big tombs in the graveyards in New Orleans? This is exactly like those.”
We buried the hamster that night.