Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The Hamster wheel






Having waded through the dredges of my memory to compose the previous story, I seem to have unearthed other buried childhood recollections.

This one is about a hamster we bought when I was about ten, my brothers named him Coolious (pronounced "cool" then " 'ee'-ous"). He started off in a rather small cage, I think my parents thought he wouldn't last very long. But as days turned into months us kids pooled our weekly allowances to buy him a fancy cage, with tubes going every which way, and most importantly a shiny yellow plastic running wheel attached to the side of the cage. We all agreed with high pitched enthusiasm in the pet store that a wheel would be a definite must, and where eager to get home and watch Coolious run his little hamster heart out in the shiny yellow wheel. We set up his new cage complete with shredded newspaper carpeting, fresh cotton wool for bedding and enough food for ten hamsters. With a combined extreme giddiness amounting to a perplexing silence for our young ages, us four kids watched wide eyed as my mother introduced Coolious into his new home. Coolious was much less impressed with the cage then we were. He sniffed around the edges, checked the the cotton wadding and performed a brief tour of the intricate tubes. Having found them satisfactory he then approached the wheel, we eagerly watched waiting for him to climb in and run like mad, but all Coolious did was place one timid paw on its base and having felt it shift with his weight, found the entire contraption ridiculous and went to dig into his abundant food. My mother explained to us that he would have to get use to his new cage before he started to enjoy all its benefits.

So everyday for just over a week we would all ask one another if any one had seen Coolious running in his wheel. Eventually we began to think maybe Coolious was just not the wheelie running type of hamster.
Then one day our mother poked her head into my room and listened for a moment, she asked if I knew where that strange noise was coming from, I didn't hear anything. I followed her out into the hall where I could hear it, my siblings already searching for the noises origin. Then my little brother called from inside the upstairs play room that he'd found it. We all crowded around Coolious's cage, and watched as our little hamster ran like crazy, not in, but on top of his big yellow wheel. He was perched in the small area between the roof of the cage and on the outer top part of his wheel, and he was clearly having a ball.

Since no one had told Coolious that that wasn't the way to use the wheel, he simply did it his way. It didn't matter to him that the hamster on the cages assembly box ran inside the wheel, he was his own hamster, did things his own unique hamstery way. I think I learnt something that day, I'd heard expressions and teachings that went along the idea of not following the pack but using your own mind and will to be your own person, but this was the first time I'd witnessed it in a way my ten year old mind could understand. So a few days later when I decided to wear one of my long elasticized skirts as a dress and my mother told me it was a skirt and not a dress, I told her I could run on my own wheel any way I wanted, it was a small step, but it was a start.



Enough childhood mushiness now!


On a completely unrelated note I'm going to put up the pictures of what I wore yesterday, and my new pants from Bassike arrived today, so I quickly snapped a picture of them before I wriggled into their cool comfiness.


First three photos: Vanessa Bruno jacket, Vanessa Bruno shirts layered, vintage pants, Marni ballet flats, Luella handbag with See By Chloe mouse key chain attached, Tiffany long silver necklace and hippy gemstone on strip of leather, also have on a short snoopy necklace & a round Je T'aime necklace, not sure if you can see them though...

Last two photos: Bassike Pants, hanging Marc by Marc Jacobs shoes & costume pearls

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