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writers:
lin
@le
mute
(a complete list)
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Charles comes home on the train... |
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Non-Fiction
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2004-06-26 |
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We lost Charles, our favorite blonde dwarf hamster who looks like a tiny, tubby teddybear with pink ears and nose... The Big Daddy, the aging patriarch of our hamster family, he's been having some health problems (he's getting up there in hamster years), so we were slightly more concerned for him than usual when we noticed he had escaped his cage through a tiny opening in the lid, a seemingly acrobatic feat for such a chill old cutie like Charles. Oh no... ham on the loose.
We've had hams escape before... they generally turn up in less than a day when my eagle-eyed wife spots them scurrying across the floor or scampering towards the little bowls of food and water we surreptitiously leave on the floor as enticements to bring them back from their wayward journeying. If they don't turn up after a day or so, though, well, that means they're lost for good, escaped into the infrastructure of our building, our city, oblivion.
Charles escaped on Sunday afternoon. As of Thursday, four days later, he hadn't turned up despite our prayers, little dishes of food and water and abundant worrying. Poor Charles. We were resigned to the loss of our favorite ham, and rather profoundly sad about it. For three days, it was as if a dark haze of depression had stubbornly settled over our house. Many were the times I'd pass the studio and see Sine gazing forlornly into the empty hamster cage, face filled with sadness, reddened cheeks pressed into white palms.
Thursday morning was cold and sprinkly, so I took the train to work. As we pulled into the 135th street stop, I crossed my legs and felt something move in the toe of my left shoe. I was slightly bummed, figuring that the innards of my 25 year old green suede Keds was finally wearing out. Easily irritated by lumps in my shoe or sock, I pulled off my shoe (conspicuity in the subway is underrated) to see what was going on down there... and found Charles. Yep. Stuffed into the one-size-too-large abundant toe of my shoe. Good thing I didn't bike, the toeclips would have been problematic.
With a literal shout of "HOLY FUCK!" that got the attention of the entire train car, I scooped the body of my tiny certainly-dead hammie out of my shoe, right there as the train pulled out of 135th street; a troubling prospect for anyone, no matter how you slice it. Charles' body was horrendously dirty; his silky blonde hair was matted, sticky and blackened. His paper-thin left ear was a crushed red mass; his pallid pink skin showed through the several patches of missing hair. One of his eyes was swollen completely shut. No signs of life at all. it was just about to be too much for me to handle; I am somewhat sensitive about pets dying, even moreso when retrieving such from my shoe... on the subway going to work.
But then I saw a tiny, miniscule little breath. Then a nose twitch. Then one eye vaguely opened with the odd charm that only a beloved pet coming back from the shock of being at the verge of death can have. Charles was alive!
Rather than waste the time backtracking home, I decided to simply take Charles into work with me. Hell, i work at a hospital, and had everything on hand that I could possibly need. Sprinting from the 168th street station into my office, a fading Charles cradled in hand, I noticed him squirming some, showing the various signs of life that are sparked by being rescued from certain death in your master's shoe...
I brought Charles in and immediately washed him and cleaned his woulds with betadine; he has a chronic infection on his belly that I was certain would abcess after being exposed to whatever muck he tramped through while on the dole. Although I was certain he was beyond mere dehydration, he refused water, which I was sure would be his key to quickly recovering. Mustering the rodent-injection techniques gleaned from my previous job, I gave Charles 15cc's of saline subcutaneously, as well as a surely appreciated drop of ketamine, and set to making him a nest of shreaded paper towels in a box here in my office. Before I could even get him situated in his box, he was already walking around some, hobbling on his exhausted, injured little legs.
Somewhat hydrated, pain-free and clean, Charles began to immediately animate. He started nibbling lightly on a bit of my coworker's doughnut and taking sips of water from a tiny paper dish I rigged up. Charles was very quickly on the mend...
I decided to give him some time to convalesce in peace and calm down a bit before subjecting him to another 40 minute train ride home; the tiny ham-brain can only tolerate so much shock in a day. I placed him snugly in his box with some water soaked pieces of pita bread (which he ate every single slimy bit of as the day quietly passed) and hid the box in a warm, quiet corner of my office and tried to get some very preoccupied work done.
After lunch, I heard him scratching around in the box. Looking in on him, I discovered that he was "bathing", doing his typical hamster trick of smoothing his ears and whiskers down with his front paws, looking content and happy for the first time in quite some time. I decided to leave work early and take him home.
When I got to the house, I found Sine standing in front of a sink of dirty dishes, frowning, moping. I said "hey, I brought you something from work", which I often say before presenting her with a piece of candy or some other triviality, and she looked over at me like "oh well. ok, then", still visibly depressed about the loss of Charles, unaware of his day of shoe-bourne oddyssey to 168th street and back.
The only face more animated than hers, when I placed a very tired but very happily alive Charles in her hands, was Charles' face itself, when first opening his single unswollen eye after being retrieved from my shoe. It was an answered prayer, of sorts, a rare beautiful thing you have to stop and appreciate as it unfolds, a feeling of joy so fleeting and hard to put into words.
We fed Charles, got him comfy, and purchased for him a new, much larger space-age hamster house (with a securely locking door and glow in the dark wheel), in which he is now comfortably snoozing, most likely in his favorite old coffee-can, his look-alike blonde baby boy skirting around him in the cage.
Charles is a happy hamster, and we are happy people thanks to his return. I'm not sure how he got outside our apartment to where we store our shoes by the front door, nor why he chose to climb into my shoe, but I'm glad he did... its what brought him home.
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austin : this article should be called 'ham on the loose'!
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Peter to austin
:
...or, "Ham on the Run!"
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austin : Or maybe blurbed "Pressed Ham".
glad you found you hammy!
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Peter to austin
:
oh look! al the ads to the right are about HAM. yay!
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jo : warning, warning: picture cannot fully represent how heart-breakingly adorable charles is. charles is more hamster cuteness than can possibly be captured in a jpg.
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xep : this is the best story i've heard in a long time
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simon to austin
: dude! PRESSED HAM! hahaha
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weeb : i just keep thinking about what if Peter bought shoes that were the right size.
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austin : moons over my hammy.
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weeb : i am feeling like a pressed ham.
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chemicalpilate : This is good on sunny Sunday afternoons.
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Peter :
RIP Charles
charles passed away early this morning, from old age. he was a happy ham, and a good pet; we will miss him. incidentally, when i wrote this entry, he was very old already, and that was almost a year ago. he had a very long life, for an adventurous ham!
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Peter :
homage to old shoes...
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elaine : i expect it smelled quite a bit of essence of you
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