Behold the olde saw in The Tool Shed of Life: A person often resembles his pet.
After many nights of restless torment and aggravated regret, I can add with deathly certainty: A person’s life often resembles his pet’s.
This searing epiphany arrived in the wake of my wife presenting our seven-year-old son and four-year-old daughter with a gift of two common domestic hamsters. The atwit tots named the fuzzy buggers Spot (for his distinctive markings) and Nippy (for his distinctive ability to bite like a barracuda). Sadly, Spot met a ghastly fate five days later under the heel of my daughter’s shoe.
I should pause here to add that my daughter is not a serial killer under construction. She willfully tortures only her parents. However, she is malfeasant and somewhat clumsy.
We had repeatedly and stridently warned her not to take the hamsters out of their cage (which we had so wisely placed in her room) without our permission and supervision. Alas she did. Her attention wandered, so did Spot, and a most unfortunate meeting of rodent and footwear ensued.
Gentle Spot expired that night. The following morning — a dank, drizzly Sunday — I gathered his tiny carcass, a sturdy shovel, The Good Book, and the family in our backyard for a grim burial service. Reading from the Book of Job with as much evangelical fervor as I could muster, I howled into the wind:
“So Satan went forth from the presence of the LORD and smote Job with severe boils from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. And he took a potsherd to scrape himself as he sat among the ashes … what?”
My dear wife’s steely gaze was hard upon me. I cleared my windpipe and bravely continued: “Job answered and said, ‘Would that God decide to crush me, that he would put forth his shoe and cut me off. My flesh is cloaked with worms and scabs, my skin cracks and festers and’ … and… aw hell! Would anyone care to say anything?”
The moist wind gusted. My moist wife grunted. My moist daughter absently picked her nose and kicked at the ground where my moist son and his moist two-year-old brother were rolling in a riotous heap of roughhousing.
Now that Spot is safely ensconced in the ground and Nippy is safely ensconced in the haven of my bedroom, I must confront guilt as well as the terror that comes from realizing that this little creature is actually an Agent of the Lord calling me to account for my actions.
Each night, as soon as my damned head hits the pillow, the little S.O.B. takes to his exercise wheel and assaults my slumbers for hours on end with:
SQUONK! SQUONK! SQUONK! Weeee HAGH! SQUONK! SQUONK! SQUONK! Weeee HAGH! SQUONK! SQUONK! SQUONK! Weeee HAGH!
It rends the soul to lie in the dark, listening to the haunting soundtrack of one’s life, a life that has placed lots of miles on the old odometer with no forward motion to speak of. It’s the endless cycle of risin’ at dawn, fightin’ the traffic on the way to the station, squeezin’ onto the train where some guy’s head inevitably lolls snoring and drooling on your shoulder all the way to the city, battlin’ all day in the office for the Yankee dollar, squeezin’ back onto the train where a truculent drunk inevitably spills beer on your shoes, then swervin’ through the traffic back to your shack for an exhausted collapse in the rack.
SQUONK! SQUONK! SQUONK! Weeee HAGH!
In my few fleeting moments of sleep, I’ve been having this dream:
I am dead. A hamster in a long black coat stands o’er me, Good Book in tiny paw. Parson Hamster, with impressive diction, reads from the Book of Job: “Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery? Are not his days those of a hireling who waits for his wages? So I have been assigned months of misery, and troubled nights have been told for me.”
SQUONK! SQUONK! SQUONK! Weeee HAGH! SQUONK! SQUONK! SQUONK! Weeee HAGH! SQUONK! SQUONK! SQUONK! Weeee HAGH!