That reminds me....

Jon's post about the great hamster disaster of '69 made me laugh - and remember. It made me remember two stories, actually.

When I was in the 4th grade, we lived in a trailer park in Cathedral City, CA, outside Palm Springs. The hills behind the trailer park - the "Sage & Sand Trailer Park" to be exact - were nothing but rocks. No trees, no vegetation, just big rocky hills. This family of kids with whom we'd become friends had a really cool fort up in the hills. It was a cleft in the rocks, set back where two hills came together. It was really, really cool. So of course, we played Army and tried to take over their fort. We never succeeded. But what really sucked was that we didn't have a fort of our own. We were newcomers. All the good forts were already taken. So, in a gesture totally out of character for them, my parents hiked up into the hills with us and helped us build a fort. It was pretty bleak. It was basically a ring of rocks piled about a foot high, in the middle of the blazing sun, on the side of this rocky hill. We gussied it up (I'm using that word a lot today) by making "rooms" in our fort. We did this by dividing the big circle with "walls" of rocks piled about a foot high. It wasn't nearly as cool as our friends' fort, but it was ours. And of course, the other kids wanted it, so we had tons of fun playing Army and trying to capture each others' forts.

So, what does all this have to do with hamsters, you ask? Well, that year my mom decided to get us some white mice. Maybe she was using them for sex ed. I'm not sure what prompted her, because she wasn't big on rodents as pets, especially mice. Nevertheless, we had a pair of white mice. And before long, we had 10 white mice. I remember watching them being born. And like Jon's hamster, one of the parents decided to make a meal from some of the babies. But we rescued most of them by removing the offending parent (I'm sure it was the father mouse). Like most little kids, we four were enthralled with the mice. We carried them everywhere with us, played with them non-stop, the usual. But mice stink. I'm not sure if it was Mom or Dad who decided we'd had them long enough, but the time came to get rid of them. We four kids were crying and begging to be allowed to keep them. A compromise was reached. We could let the mice live in our fort - in the rock walls. We kids thought that was perfect. They would live there, we'd see them every day, feed them, etc. I don't know what we were smoking. I think I caught a knowing look pass between my parents, but didn't have a clue what it meant.

Off we went to release our little rodent friends into the walls of our fort. We played with them in their box for a while, then it was time to go home. We bid them goodbye, vowing to return the next day to play with them. I'm sure you can figure out what happened next. Lots of tears, and suggestions as to where they might have traveled off to when they escaped their rock-wall home, and several attempts by me for days thereafter to locate the mice among the rocks that covered the hills, all unsuccessful of course. My little 10-year-old mind imagined them all playing and scurrying about the rocks. My 52-year-old mind realizes they were probably some snake's or owl's dinner that very night.

I have a hamster story next.