This weekend my brother was in town and we were playing with Shamster, my adorable Syrian hamster. My brother brought up the death of a previous hamster many years ago that I had completely removed from my consciousness. The pet (a dwarf hamster named Cucumber), was taken out of his cage, and while crawling along my brother’s arm, slipped and fell to his death, presumably from a broken neck.

As any normal junior high or possibly early high school young woman would do, I started crying. My brother’s friend Casey, a budding hunter, started laughing. Just at that moment my friend, a large-eared Armenian fellow arrived to accompany me to the mall or the pool or some such place and began the process of comforting me by belittling my attachment to said rodent (he really was cute) and rushing me to go.

It’s so sad to me that as my brother was telling me this story it all came rushing back– the humiliation, the grief, the shock. I can’t believe I had effectively removed this memory and now I have to think about it again and fear the same fate for the current love of my life, Sham Bam Shamster the Hamster (aka Mina).

I guess I just need bigger rodents as pets so they can’t be victims to gravity like poor Cucumber.