THE LIGHTER SIDE
RICK MCCRABB
We do the strangest things in our house.
For instance, one night Tammy and our 11-year-old daughter Hannah — probably during a shopping spree — talked about the pets Tammy owned when she was Hannah’s age.
Had I been there — standing outside the dressing room with the rest of the bored men — I could have redirected the conversation by offering to buy Tammy and Hannah ice-cream cones. Nothing distracts them faster than a double-dip of cookies ’n’ cream.
Tammy tells Hannah about a couple of gerbils she owned, and how cute they were, how she loved playing with them, except she forgets the part about cleaning their cage, feeding them and the squeaky sound the wheel they run on 24 hours a day makes.
The next day, we buy a hamster, a rodent named Sweetpea. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to tell if Sweetpea is a boy or girl — and I don’t care one way or the other. It’s a rat.
Before you send me hate mail, let me tell you I’m an animal lover. I just tell the girls a hamster isn’t a good choice, at least not as long as we own two cats, Hayes and Buckeye.
I’m just guessing here, but cats and hamsters get along as well as Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner. I mean, I grew up in my pajamas watching “Tom and Jerry,” a cartoon about how a cat spends every waking minute trying to catch, kill and eat Jerry, a mouse.
And, really, aren’t a hamster and a mouse basically the same thing? Who can tell the difference? They’re like Stuart Appleby and Robert Allenby or Dermot Mulroney and Dylan McDermott.
Only their moms know for sure.
Our zoo runs smoothly until one day when Hannah sets Sweetpea’s cage on her desk in her bedroom. She apparently forgets that’s where Hayes sleeps during the day.
When Tammy gets home from work, the cage is on the floor. It’s broken, and Sweetpea is gone. Hayes still is sitting on the desk, waging his tail, but Buckeye has disappeared, like Ohio State’s defense in the final minute against Southern California.
Tammy and Hannah search for Sweetpea. No luck. You know how many places a gerbil, I mean a hamster, can hide in a house?
Since Hannah has soccer practice, they call me at work and ask me to locate Sweetpea. I figure it can’t be that hard. I expect to find a blood trail leading me to Buckeye, licking his chops over Sweetpea’s tiny remains. But there are no clues. No cat. No hamster.
We meet for dinner, and I arrive home first. When I open the front door, I’m surprised to be greeted by both cats sitting on the second step — and between them, Sweetpea, unharmed. It’s as if they had planned the whole thing — a brazen prison break so the three of them could roam the house on the lam.
I return Sweetpea to his/her cage, and both cats spend the rest of the night sitting next to their new best friend. I spend the rest of the night sorting through my mixed emotions.
The teamwork and ingenuity of the animals is kind of inspiring — and a little frightening.
But if you can’t trust Tom and Jerry, who can you trust.
This never would have happened if we’d gotten a dog.
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