Rodent On The Lam

You never know what's in store: you could get hit by a bus at any time. That's what people say. I don't know why being hit by a bus is such a thing, or why people are always getting thrown under one. It's evocative. And yet very few of us know anyone who's been hit by a bus. I do: that's how my uncle died. But he wasn't normal.

The thing is, whereas it is sort of true that you could get hit by a bus at any time, given adequate exposure, it is equally true that your life could get suddenly brighter at any time too.

Just the other day a huge happiness landed in our kitchen. Right out of nowhere. Dave was sweeping the floor and rather than sliding a chair aside he actually tilted it up. And what was under that chair but Tater's missing hamster!

 

Tater has been missing her hamster for at least three years. Dave saw it in a store window and brought it home for her. She likes to bat around little stuffed things and in some cases she likes to disembowel them with her rear feet. It's not unusual for us to come upon a tragic scene of shredded Poly-Fil stuffing and torn plush. I usually sew them back up again because we're not made of money.

(Yeah, it's a little like a young girl being surgically stitched to be re-sold as virgins. I simply have a problem looking at stuffed animals as passive constructions of lint. No. People think I, as a grown-up human, am way too invested in seeing after Pootie's needs and desires, too. But they're wrong. They don't know our history. It's thick.)

Anyway, Tater's hamster is special. We thought she didn't much like it at first. She ignored it. Until the day Dave took off and Tater didn't realize I was in the house and she set up a low, mournful yowling completely unrelated to her regular voice, and I saw her transporting the hamster into a different room and setting it down. After that we noticed that the hamster was never in the same place it had been when we left the house. She'll take it upstairs. Downstairs. If we catch her in the act she'll drop it and give it a few pretend-bats, but there isn't a mark on it. She protects it. It's her baby.

[By the way, yes, it has a tail, and is not really a hamster as much as it's a gerbil, but "hamster" is a funnier word and more fun to say, and that's that. Rules are different in a logophile's house.]

So we don't necessarily find the hamster when we come home, but happen upon it later. And that's why it took us a few weeks to realize we hadn't seen it in a while. 

I have been devastated on Tater's behalf. She loved that hamster. I've been shaking my head in sorrow over it for three years. And now it's back! We tossed it toward her and she put it between her paws and under her chin until we made too much of a fuss, and then she pretended to bat it around for a couple seconds. Later it showed up in another room, set neatly upright.

And Tater, who is somewhere around fourteen and has been slowing down, is a new cat. Lunging at squirrels on the other side of the window. Chittering at finches. Conducting spontaneous crazy-cat exercises at warp speed just because. Exuberating. Ain't nothing in the house safe from her excess of joy now, except for the hamster. He's spotless. And looking pretty bright in the buttons, too.

The Rescue Poot

We don't know how old Pootie is. He joined the household in the '80s, but, as Dave pointed out, he already seemed to have some history, with a lot of preferences as to the way the world should operate, and if a lot of those preferences aligned with Dave's own--a fondness for basketball and chocolate, say--that just goes to show he was going to be a good fit. I do know my friend Margo and I first spotted him downtown, in a store, where he was sitting in a basket of identical dogs. You could look at them as a litter, I suppose, but knowing the Poot, it was probably more of an entourage.

He was a force from Day One. Anyone could see that. Margo certainly did, and shortly went back downtown to the Arfnage and scooped Petey out of the basket. So Petey lives with Margo and Pootie lives with us.

I'm not going to say Petey lives a cushier life but there's no question she doesn't fling herself headlong into it quite the way the Poot does. There is photographic record that Pootie was once blond and fluffy, but after seven Cycle Oregon tours and countless adventures in far-flung locales, and lots of time in the sun to work on his beige, he's a changed dog. He's even gone a little bald like his hero Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, at least enough to show stitching. Petey, on the other hand, has not let herself go. We don't see her as much as we used to and it's always shocking how fluffy she is.

But it's not for lack of love. Not only is Petey a solid member of the Margo household, but Margo's niece Valentina has taken a shine to her as well. In fact, Valentina adores the entire Pootie franchise and even has a Friend Of Pootie hoodie that, reportedly, is rarely off her long enough to have hygiene applied to it. It's the niece, now ten, who discovered that, like herself, Petey is as much a Trail Blazers fan as Pootie is a Lakers fan. Which is odd in that she lives in California and we live in Oregon, but you're not going to get anywhere arguing loyalties among stuffed canine basketball fans. Valentina only gets to hang out with Petey on vacations.

Pootie, Petey, and Price Bugle

Anyway, we walked into an antique mall the other day where Dave spotted an old baby carriage right by the front door, filled with stuffed animals and dolls. And, said he, a Pootie clone right near the top.

I picked him or her up. "Man, real close," I said, "a knock-off at least, but not quite right. Pootie has a rounder face. Doesn't have this much of a muzzle." Dave said Pootie the hell did too. "I have drawn Pootie thousands of times," I said, with exaggerated patience. "I think I know what his face looks like." Dave harrumphed. We turned the animal around and up and down and Dave settled him back into the carriage, on top, to improve his prospects.

But by the time we'd seen everything in the store and were ready to walk out the door, I realized that even if the new fellow was not the same, he was certainly Pootular, and in any case we couldn't just pick him up and admire him and talk about him and then put him back and walk out the door, because that would surely crush the little guy, and we're sensitive to that kind of thing. So we fished out the three bucks and took him home.

Where I discovered he really was a member of the Pootie Posse. Pootie's muzzle just looks flatter because he's had some fur loved off.

Margo saw it right away. You can hardly see a difference between the new guy and Petey. The new guy is blond in front and a little beiger in back, is all. We realized the little dude has spent the last thirty or so years propped up in a window, and then abandoned. But someone's life is about to turn around at last. Someone's going home with Valentina.

Save The Gerbils

By the time you've had a cat for seven years, you like to think you've got her sized up, and understand her motivations and her predilections, and are only left with the occasional isolated query, such as "does that belong to you?" and "where are you going with that?" and "is that what we do with Mommy's slippers?" But like any beings sharing a confined space, you have developed an understanding.

For instance, the first cat, (Saint) Larry, was nothing like the current occupant, Tater. Larry was the very best kitty she could be except for the pooping thing, and Tater is the very best kitty she can be, apparently, within the constraints of her own nature. But they were very differently motivated.

Larry liked to eat. And by the time we'd taught her to shake hands and roll over and a few other things she learned to do for tidbits, she had tidbitted up to a sort of tortoiseshell football shape perched on dainty little feet. Visitors took to calling her "fat cat" but I thought it was slanderous, until the day I noticed that when she rolled over on command, parts of her just kept rolling. She'd get fish flakes and kibbles and a tiny portion of wet food and completely lose control if we had chicken for dinner, which drove her to petty crime.

Tater, on the other hand, does not give one shiny shit about food. She wants her maintenance half cup of kibble every day to top up the tank, but nothing else interests her at all. All she wants to do is play. All. She used to fetch those little fuzzy plush mice, and that was terrific, because I could play from my chair, but then she quit bringing them back. Dave rigged up a green mouse on fishing line and that's her very favorite game. Every day she goes and sits by the closet that the green mouse is in and acts pitiful until he comes out. She interprets every human activity, from napping to quilting to working on taxes, as a sure sign we're ready to play too.

So when the woman who was looking in on her in our absence reported "I think she's bored," we were struck by dread. We imagined coming home to a house with all paper items spindled or serrated, and a lot of progress on her ongoing Gravity Project, wherein every household item is relocated to the lowest possible point. It's been a passion of Tater's for years, and she's grown accustomed to the noise.

So while Larry had no toys at all, Tater has a whole box of them. All of them, balls and mice and feathered doo-dads, are battered and flayed. When all the fuzzy mice start to look like mummified thumbs, Dave brings home a new set. He's calm about it. He's like the conductor of the cattle car heading to Auschwitz. It's not going to go well for the new mice.

The other day Dave came back with a new toy for Tater. It was a little stuffed gerbilly fellow, and he just had a good feeling about it. I had a bad feeling about it. She already has a stuffed kiwi bird, and she takes that out for a good disemboweling from time to time, after which I gather up and re-stuff the polystyrene guts and sew the bird back up, which always makes me feel like one of those evil dudes who re-creates virgins for a paying clientele. Tater ignored the gerbil.

But then one day Dave was taking a nap, or "watching golf," as he calls it, and I had stepped outside, and within seconds I started hearing this mournful low howl, rroowwWWRRrrooowwWWRRRrow, which sounded like a cat but certainly not our cat, who has a high squeaky voice. I was alarmed. I figured Tater had cornered something I didn't want to know about, or she had pulled the refrigerator over and pinned herself, or something, and I ran inside to find her cradling her gerbil. She instantly strolled away and emitted a normal squeak.

Now we hear the mournful low howl at least once a day, always accompanied by a surreptitious relocation of the gerbil, who remains unmarred. If you toss the gerbil, she does not run after it, but waits until we're not looking and removes it to a different room. Obviously she cares deeply about the little fellow.

I think it's ridiculous, having such strong protective feelings about a stuffed animal. Pootie thinks it's stupid too, but then again he thinks cats in general are stupid.

Breast Milk Baby!

Poor Breast Milk Baby is having trouble getting traction in the toy market, even though Bill O'Reilly thought it was creepy, which should have boosted sales in the blue states. What sets BMB apart from the rest of the baby dolls out there is that it can be attached to a child's personal breast region by means of a halter. It snaps right onto little daisies at nipple height and sensors in the daisies produce suckling noises. While Mommy is busy feeding the new baby in the family, the older sister, or brother, can provide the same sort of care for the doll. This is no doubt appealing to a certain sector of young children, and it's probably up to the adults to monitor whether or not the child should wear the dangling babies out on the street like a mama possum. Bill O'Reilly is upset at what he perceives as the early sexualization of the child. (He probably puts "mammal" pretty far down on his list of self-descriptors. And I'm guessing he played with his sister's Barbie in some fashion, probably by himself.)

Staged photo, fake smile.

So Breast Milk Baby isn't doing too well in America, even though there has been plenty of precedent for this sort of thing. The Betsy Wetsy doll goes clear back to the 1950s, when it was Number One on many girls' Christmas lists, leaving Little Chuckie Upchuck and Debbie Doots in the dust. I was given one myself, and can still remember it. You poured a bottle of water in the front end, and it came out the bottom end. I was just old enough to be familiar with the concept of water running downhill and the novelty wore off on Day One. Anyone who thought I would like something I had to clean up after had the wrong girl. My own folks gave up early on getting me dolls. A few filtered in from distant aunts but they were well-neglected. I liked stuffed animals.

So baby dolls in general are probably more appealing to children who have been required to share their space with a real baby. I was that real baby. And I expected to be taken care of or ignored and, in any case, to have no responsibilities whatsoever. My stuffed animals had jobs and personalities and things to do, but they didn't need wiping. The horror! At some point I was deemed old enough to babysit other people's kids, for which I received fifty cents an hour. I was vastly overpaid. As far as I was concerned, I was just there in case the house burned down.

Breast Milk Baby wouldn't have been a hit when I was growing up. Betsy Wetsy came with a bottle and so did most of the rest of us. Mommy was a fully-clothed entity: she had a comfy hourglass figure encased neck to knees in modest cotton. I could see the general shape was different from Daddy's but I was not interested in or provided with much detail. If I search my memory for any such detail, nothing in particular sticks out.

And that is why the painting Daddy hung above the fireplace was so puzzling. One day, I set about to satisfy my curiosity. My neighbor Susie and I together couldn't make it out. She usually had more reliable information about Things Which Must Not Be Said In Front Of The Children than I did, but she was a year younger, so she was puzzled too. The painting in question is of a young, smiling black-haired woman in a red dress. The dress in question stopped short of getting the job done, by my mother's standards. Two smooth globes rose above the top of it. Susie and I had no idea what they were. They looked like little bald heads. We pointed. "Are those her babies?" we asked.

We did not get an answer. We asked again. Still no answer.

Click to embiggen. Any ideas?

The painting was probably a famous one, maybe one in the National Gallery of Art, which was nearby. It can safely be assumed that Daddy picked out the painting. He liked that sort of thing. He liked Sophia Loren. He liked her a lot. After Susie and I asked our question, I'm thinking Mommy liked it a lot less. She might have thought it could only lead to trouble.

55 years later, she's been proven right. Because I've just wasted a ton of time trying to find the painting on line. I've Googled "painting red dress boobs" and have only scratched the surface of the five billion images that came up. Dave's offered to try to help narrow it down, maybe some day I'm off running errands. So there's that.