Gerbils

Today we made our second visit to the Gerbil Fair sponsored by the American Gerbil Society. Our previous one was probably two years ago. This is an event where - in this case, in the rented student union of a rather nearby community college, gerbil aficionados gather to display their pets, pit them against other gerbils in fierce competitions like races to see who can chew the most toilet paper roll in five minutes, pursue mazes, obstacle courses, and, of course, a grand competition for the gerbil equivalent of "best in show." It turns out that there are many factors that go into what makes a great, show-worthy gerbil, and there were people there who could certainly fill you in on the details. There were tables that sold gerbil gear of all kinds and gerbil-themed pencils, American Gerbil Society t-shirts, caps... There was a gerbil photography contest, in which everyone was encouraged to vote (and a sign overhead about "The People's Choice"); of course Amy voted. There were judges in white coats with their names embroidered in blue on their solemn uniforms. There was even a pair of ladies promoting their rabbit adoption society, with a rabbit on display in a little pen, and there was also a chinchilla. Something for everyone.

And of course, a car in the parking lot had a vanity plate: "GERBILZ".

It is easy to poke fun at this extremely dedicated society, but I really did find the whole thing heart-warming. One particularly impressive thing about it all, is that these are not "cat-ladies," so to speak; they're a diverse group with a number of intellectuals in the crowd, and they're people who don't let their intelligence wall them off from maintaining an outspoken affection for furry little creatures. I think it's good to love animals - spiritually, and not merely abstractly good - and it's no coincidence that the people themselves seem very kind and sincere. And they have a point: gerbils are very sweet. In spite of their tiny size, they really seem to relate to people, and they're affectionate with each other as well. There's nothing "verminy" about them; they have nice little coats and seem to come in all colors, and they have delicate figures and bristly-ending little tails, and pointy, twitching, active little noses. They're good.

But one hilarious thing about all of this is that we were the only ones in the crowd, aside from the bunny-ladies, it seemed, who didn't actually own gerbils. We went two years ago as animal lovers, and also in our capacity as former gerbil owners. When I married Amy, she had four "girls" on top of DJ-the-wonder-dog, and I quickly caught on to her affection for them, and was pleased to still have them - or most of them - when we made the northward homesteading trek when Amy was pregnant with Ian. We were sorry when they died. In fact, Amy wanted me to sing something with her when one of them died - she wasn't sure what, some happy, youthful tune, I suspect - but then she changed her mind, because it would have made her too sad. This is pretty-much why I married Amy.

So it seemed appropriate for us to go to a gerbil show, even if we were the only "amateurs" in the crowd.

Quick little quip: I did manage to stumble into a bout of political incorrectness while I was there. We were talking to the bunny ladies about our the lagomorph who lives in our own family room - and occupies a fair bit of it with her little Amy-crafted pen - and at one point, Amy asked me, "How long have we had Bunny?" and I said, "I don't know - it feels like forever." The ladies were superficially amused, but clearly also somewhat hurt by what may seem to the casual observer like a bit of irreverence.

In any case, Ian got to work very quickly after we arrived at the venue. He wanted to take me off to the far end of the hall to show me "his" gerbil. As I walked with him, one of the organizer-ladies smiled, hearing me say, "Now Ian, bear in mind that Mommy and I haven't even talked about buying a guinea pig." In short order, his vision was at once expanded and yet self-consciously modest: "Daddy, if you added mine and Daniel's, it would be sixteen dollars." Later, he was focusing back on his own eight-dollar treasure, but he found a way of making it less daunting to the individual investor, by distributing the expense across two entirely unrelated sources of funds: "What if you paid four dollars, and Mommy paid four dollars?" [And needless to say, our entire concern was focused around this single expenditure, since gerbils pretty-much take care of themselves once a seven-year-old brings them home...Plus, they're nothing that two crazy puppies would even think about eating.] I asked the superficial question as to where we might put them, to keep them safe from small dogs, and possibly small children, but Ian had a very reassuring answer: "...Well, I can put them in a spot where they'll never see them. I have a lot of secret places." To his credit, Ian understood their tremendous practical value of rodent-ownership, which I had never considered: "If we get a gerbil, it can actually get rid of our boxes and trash."

Meanwhile, Daniel and Madeleine wanted gerbils as well, but, to my great relief, the ones they had in mind were knit. [Yes, there was a table that featured hand-knit gerbils, which, it turns out, cost the same amount as some of the live ones.] Unsurprisingly, Madeleine selected a pink-and-white-but-mostly-pink gerbil. Daniel, on the other hand, chose an orange one. The "surprise," on Daniel's part, was more in the somewhat unconventional name: "Orangey Pit." [I get the "orangey," but I can't imagine where the whole "pit" paradigm came from...] My high-school friend, Steven, was one of the organizers of the event, and he told me and Daniel that his wife had, over the years, owned over 800 gerbils - apparently largely in a special capacity as shelter-provider-and-home-finder for gerbils in transit or in unusual circumstances - and, in spite of the great number of creatures, none of them, to his recollection, had ever had the name "Orangey Pit." Of course, now that it's getting blogged, there will be an entire generation of American boys with the name "Orangey Pit," but it's important to remember that the very catchy-yet-sensible name originated with our own Young Daniel...

After about two hours in a room full of little glass tanks lined with cedar chips, it seemed like Daniel had had enough, and he started screaming that he wanted to leave. I thought a little bit of car-time would yield a lot of nap, so I wasn't against some kind of accommodation. For whatever reason, Amy seemed to think that Madeleine would benefit from the same activity, which, of course, should be led by me. So in relatively short order, Daniel, Madeleine and I were frolicking about a playground in the center of the pleasant, mildly yuppyish, suburb that was hosting this important convention, a town called Bedford, with that important stop along the way - or not really on the way - to recharge Daddy's afternoon batteries at a drive-through known as "Dunkin Donuts," where, it turns out, "cappuccino" apparently has an extra sweet, syrupy bouquet not-yet-discovered by the Italians... But their loss was my gain once the caffeine kicked in.

I got lost on the way back, since New England doesn't believe in posting signs telling you what road you're on, since you presumably already know that if you're in the place where you belong, and it was very upsetting, because I set out before 5:00 and now it was almost 7:00 p.m., and I didn't know why Amy hadn't called, but I assumed that they were sitting outside some awful state-funded piece of locked-up, emptied out institutional architecture waiting for their ride home. But no - pretty-much all the cars that were there when I left were still in their spots, and the devotees were very much in attendance, including Ian and Amy. The "real" contest was just finishing (what we saw in the afternoon was the "mock" contest, which serves to whet once's whistle ever-so-tantalizingly in preparation for the grand finale). And now that it was over, our fate became sealed.

In addition to two dogs, two aquatic frogs, somewhere between two and four guppies, I think (the numbers keep changing with guppies), and Fuzzy the Bunny, we now have gerbils. Three gerbils. All "belonging" to Ian, and yet with two of them virtually associated with Amy and Daniel, respectively. In fact, Ian named one and let Amy and Daniel name the others: Ian named the peach-colored one "Peaches." Amy named the reddish-golden one "Rhett," after Rhett Butler from "Gone with the Wind," but also as a tribute to his own fair highlights (I had suggested "Golden," but that happens to be the name of one of our named-by-a-child puppies, who is actually more White than Golden, but the child in question already had a "dog" named White at the time, albeit a stuffed one...) But unsurprisingly, Daniel chose the most original name for "his" gerbil, which is black-coated: "Blackout." I don't think Daniel knows what a blackout is; he probably heard Amy and me talking about it one of the umptillion times that our afterthought-of-a-state lost electrical power (or perhaps in my many tales of debauchery). But because the gerbil is black, and "Blackout" begins with "black," he found it a fitting name. Which it is, of course, but "Orangey Pit" is still a tough act to follow.

On the way home, we had to stop at Toys R Us to get a present for Ian's schoolmate whose birthday party is tomorrow afternoon. [Ian has attended many more parties in the past year than Amy and me put together...] Daniel went in with Amy, after the little "No Merchandise" speech, but Ian and Madeleine stayed in the car - Ian by choice - and when Madeleine had her clockwork "why-am-I-not-where-Mommy-is?" meltdown, Ian jumped to his feet and announced he would cheer her up with gerbils (a rather typical bit of nurture on his part). Within a minute or two, a gerbil was running back and forth the length Ian's outstretched arms with Madeleine squealing with delight. In my standard neurotic mode, I was very unhappy, worrying that a tiny gerbil might fall many times his height from Ian's arm and be injured or lost, but Ian lectured anyone who would listen on how he had just figured out that the way to take care of a gerbil was just give it room to run around on you. Of course, he turned out to be right in his blithe optimism.

I never signed off on this one, per se. Amy has a tendency to do what she really wants to, and to talk herself out of things if she thinks it's a bad idea, and to recruit me to do that job when she's not sure, and she didn't seem to go through the standard checks-and-balances this time around. I think people should have their true heart's desires - by and large - and I'm only interested in applying common sense when it seems to be needed very urgently. This time around, we're all in mourning about the passing of the Great Age of Guinea Pigs, which began in 2002 and ended only a couple of months ago with the demise of Funny-In-The-Face. [Reminder: I don't name any of our animals.] So this time, I think I assumed that if we ended up taking gerbils home, it would be because at least one person really felt that they needed them. Of course, I hadn't factored in Ian's tendency to lobby, which apparently works better with Amy than it does with me. But I don't think this is a unilateral decision. As we were leaving the Convention, Amy told me that this time around we had all "boy" gerbils, "...but maybe next year we'll get girls."

(April 30, 2011)