Summer Memories

[Fistandantalus]

When I was a kid, being homeschooled was a real anomaly and typically meant that one was a "problem kid" (they hadn't invented ADD yet), was a full-fledged member of the Tassajara Commune or went to school by radio in the Outback. We were a middle-class family in a middle-class neighborhood in the middle of California, and some of our neighbors didn't quite understand why we had gallon jars of pickled frogs prominently displayed on the back porch, a very large and loud homemade rock polisher where our suburban barbeque should have been, and the occasional explosion, such as the time our ammonia fountain went haywire and killed a number of my father's prize begonias.

And then there was the matter of my attempt at breeding Panda Bear hamsters the summer I was eleven, both a genetics science project and business opportunity, at least in my mind, as the local pet shop was offering $100 to the first kid who brought in a Panda Bear hamster in an effort to rid themselves of a surplus of hamsters. A Panda Bear hamster is a hamster that has been bred to look like a panda bear, in case anybody thought it was anything else, so I started with two black hamsters and two white hamsters. They made a pile of baby hamsters and the ones with the correct characteristics were removed and bred with correct-characteristic hamsters from the other pair, and so on and so on. So I had about two hundred non-correct hamsters in an obscenely huge Habitrail that ran all through the schoolroom and out onto the back porch, where I also kept the breeding pairs.

Of course, one day the inevitable happened and somehow a section of Habitrail came apart and all remotely intelligent hamsters within headed for the hills, or in this case every neighbor's house, garage, garden, attic and basement for several blocks. My parents did what I thought then and still think to be the most intelligent thing they could have done--within 24 hours of The Great Hamster Escape, all signs that a hamster had ever inhabited our house had been erased. And even though general opinion was that it was the local pet shop's fault, I'm sure some had a pretty good idea of where those black-and-white hamsters really came from.

The item that got the most neighborhood attention that summer was the yurt that my father built as a kind of playhouse in the back yard. Perhaps it was all the basement pallor and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from shaking Dungeons and Dragons dice, but he thought we needed to get outdoors more and had recently read an article in The New York Times about Nomadic Mongolians, so he built us a yurt out of an old expandable baby gate, some PVC pipe, rope and canvas tarpaulins. The yurt was amazingly like the real thing, round and about 12 feet across and 8 feet tall,and we got our fabric paints and decorated the tarps with Mongolian-looking (to us, anyway) symbols and designs. We even dug a hole and installed an old stainless steel bowl as a firepit. Needless to say, a bunch of pre-teen kids howling bloody blue murder and hopping around a firepit is bound to draw attention and rumors about the yurt began to circulate. Since this was an age when people did not come right out and talk about such things, when a gaggle of local mothers came around to bother my mother about what might be going on in the yurt, they were so hampered by euphemisms that my mother had no idea what they were talking about and proudly explained that it was a replica of a Mongolian yurt, yes, isn't it interesting and the gaggle eventually wandered away to find something a little easier to understand to protest.

[mamaphouka]

Jul. 8, 2009 at 11:32 AM

Whatever happened with the hamster colony? Did they go feral? Is there still a middle class neighborhood in the middle of California that is home to a panda bear hamster village?

p.s. I'm so glad you're back and I hope you feel better.

[evwsquared]

Jul. 8, 2009 at 3:47 PM

How close did you get to breeding a panda bear hamster?

[MemaSu]

Jul. 8, 2009 at 8:21 PM

Glad you are doing better- I hope since you are writing posts again! My brother had mice. I had guinea pig & they escaped one day from their outdoor fence, which I used to move around so they could eat fresh grass. Never did find them all....