Donuts

When I was in preschool, I used to scribble on a piece of paper and say that it was a drawing of a donut. I think I knew that it didn’t look anything like a donut. It was roundish, at least, but thats where the similarities ended. It didn’t have a hole. It was all squiggly with crayon lines going every which way. It was tree green or sky blue or whatever color I pulled randomly out of the box. But it captured at the time what I must have felt when I thought of a donut. And sometimes, when I’m in Dunkin’ Donuts or Tim Hortons, I still think of those squiggly crayon donuts I used to bring home.

Kiki

Kiki was my sister’s hamster. She got this pet for her 8th birthday, making me 5 at the time. I always had the habit of calling Kiki “he.” I guess little boys tend to assume that all animals are male. But since it was my sister’s pet, we assumed it was female. We didn’t find out that Kiki was actually male until we took him to the vet. He had gotten some fabric caught on his teeth, which were badly in need of a trim. Of course, by this time, I had finally accepted that Kiki was female, and it would take some time thereafter for me to get used to calling him “him” again. The name Kiki would be awfully traumatic for a male hamster. This might have been the root of his emotional problems and subsequent misbehavior.

Hamsters are funny animals. They sleep all day. They can be moody and bite people. I guess that makes them pretty similar to professional musicians. They have this little useless half-inch of a tail. Kiki couldn’t get the hang of the hamster wheel. He would never actually get inside the wheel and run. He would kind of get next to it and climb up the side and spin it around, a little like that big wheel on “The Price is Right.” He was pretty resilient considering the abuse he faced. One time my sister stuck Kiki in a plastic toy airplane, and we had a hard time getting him out. He bit all of us at least once. If you got him riled up, he’d let out this pathetic little hamster squeal and then bite your finger or whatever body part was closest to him. Maybe he thought we were sticking a carrot into the cage when we stuck our hand in. He also bit the annoying neighbor girl a couple of times.

One time Kiki just got fed up and ran away from us. I guess my sister had him out of the cage, and he ran down into the basement. Our basement was, and still is to this day, a hopeless mess of a junk storage space, with lots of places a hamster could hide. We were never sure exactly where he went. There was a little hole in a corner of the basement wall, and we think he spent most of his time there. We got one of those humane traps meant to catch small rodents without killing them. It was the kind of mechanism where the animal would walk in and step on a trigger, causing the door to close behind. Each night, we would put a hamster pellet on the inside, past the trigger. Each morning, we would come back to find that the hamster pellet had been taken, but that the trap remained open. Finally, after about a week, we used peanut butter. We put it on a coffee filter or some little piece of paper, and put that in the trap past the trigger. That kept Kiki there long enough to trigger the trap. So after a weeks vacation in the basement, we had are cuddly, beloved little pet back, safe and sound.