Cats are famous for having nine lives, but I’ve never read any statistics on the life expectancy of gerbils. I can only speak from experience, but my guess is it’s much longer that the size of this tiny vertebrate would tend to suggest.
When our kids were growing up, we had a cavalcade of pets, as do most active families. All told, we had five collies, bowls of fish, a few rescued robin hatchlings, mallard ducks and Canadian geese salvaged from the jaws of foxes and vicious turtles.
More than once our kids acted as surgery assistants while my mother cracked out her needles and threads to sew up the bellies of geese after stuffing their intestines back into their stomach cavities. A couple of times she used their popsicle sticks as stints for setting broken bird legs. One time Benjy and a friend were fishing for carp with corn as bait, when a hungry swan dove down for the corn and swallowed it—hook, line, and sinker, as they say. The hook full of corn lodged about halfway down the swan’s graceful neck. Gasping for air and unable to swallow, the swan gladly let us catch her and take her to the vet. The vet looked helpless at the prospect of working on a swan and said to Suzanne and me, “It will probably die.”
“Oh, no!” I said. “You are going to slit its throat vertically and take out the hook.” The vet looked at me as if I’d swallowed the hook and said, “I don’t have a surgical assistant this afternoon.” I pointed with my thumb to the two of us and said, “We’ll be your assistants. Give this sweet bird some anesthetic and let’s get started.”
We kept the recovering swan in a big box in the playroom so we could keep watch over her and offer her bread soaked in milk as she was able to swallow. When she breathed, the intake of air whistled through the stitches like a kid who needed to blow his nose.
That night Suzanne had invited a friend for a sleep-over, and they slept on the playroom couch hide-a-bed so they could keep check on the swan throughout the night. At 6:30 am, the Young Life prayer group called the Campaigners came for their hot chocolate, doughnuts, and prayer for their classmates. When they left, Suzanne’s friend said, “This is the craziest house I ever stayed in. I didn’t sleep a wink, between the whistling swan gasping for air all night and the “campaigners” showing up at the crack of dawn!”
Oh, well. That was pretty much normal for our house, so I guess if it was sleep the poor girl needed, she might have chosen to have had an overnight with some other friend.
But I digress. I was talking about pets. One of our most famous pets was a gerbil we called Charlie. He was fun and happy and a joy to watch as he spun himself around the gerbil Ferris wheel in his cage. The kids would take him out sometimes to run up and down their arms or play under the covers before putting him in for the night.
One time Benjy had some friends over to shoot rubber band guns in the basement. Suzanne had a bit of a crush on one of the boys and to impress him, swung Charlie around by the tail. She was mortified to find that she had fractured Charlie’s tail right in the middle. Forever after that Charlie’s tail was a perfect L.
Charlie was no dummy. He learned to reach his little arms through the bars of his cage and flip open the door latch. Mostly, when he got out, we would find him and put him safely back where he belonged, but after one escape he was gone longer than usual. We searched high and low (literally!) but no Charlie. For days we listened at night in the quiet hours, but there were no tell-tale scratchings to give him away. We searched behind the chairs and couches and in the cupboards and pantries. We didn’t even find his tiny droppings. Poor Charlie! He must have escaped outside into the cold or died from starvation in some dark closet.
Finally, we just gave up the search and gradually quit talking about him. Charlie was a lost cause that only made us sad when we saw his still little wheel in his deserted cage. The cage door we left open just in case, and for a while we left food in his feeding trough. but we never awoke to find Charlie had come home on his own. He was just gone.
At last it was November. After Thanksgiving I pulled the Christmas decorations out from above the garage ceiling to sort for December. And in the basement from under the stairway, I drug out the nativities, including the little one made of paper mâché that the children had put up themselves when they were small.
In that box there was what seemed to be shredded packing that I didn’t remember using. That’s when I heard a familiar scratching way back behind the water heater where the nativity had been. Sure enough, it was Charlie, alive and...well, at least alive. He had found water where the hose to the washer sometimes dripped from condensation. And for food? Isn’t paper mâché made with corn starch glue?
I’m just saying, Charlie with his L-shaped tail was alive, and two shepherds, a lamb, and half of the virgin Mary were gone. Charlie was greeted with squeals of joy from the kids, the cage latch was reinforced, and we all—including Charlie—had a very merry Christmas, sure that cats have nothing on gerbils for life expectancy.
