Elegy for a hamster

I was just getting used to the little guy. He no longer tried to bite me when I picked him up, and would even come out of his little sleeping pod for a friendly visit. He seemed to enjoy being pet and having his little tummy rubbed.

My husband thought having a pet would be a great idea. It would be a good opportunity for our children to learn responsibility for another creature, and to learn the painful lessons of grieving before, G-d forbid, well, anyway...

We didn't expect it to happen so soon. Before bed, my son went to check on his hamster and spend some quality time with him. He came out, clearly distressed. My husband and I went in to inspect the little guy, and we knew his time had come. He lay in his pod, shivering and unresponsive.

I rushed my husband out the door and sent him to the emergency pet hospital. My son and I paced and worried, and snuggled on the couch together praying for the best. We got the call from the hospital, "Chomp didn't make it. They had to put him down."

My son and I held each other and sobbed. You know, I said, you did a great job taking care of him. You cleaned his cage each week, you made sure he was fed and his water bottle filled. He really loved you. There wasn't anything we could do. He just got sick.

My boy turned his red and puffy eyes up at me and whispered, "I know." We cried and I held him some more and then I sent him to bed.

What's the Shiva period for a hamster? I asked my husband. "Seven minutes." Came the terse reply.

It's been less than a week and we've moved on. The empty, cleaned out cage still serve as a reminder of the extra little presence in our lives. My son seems to be over his heartbreak, but I can't shake the feelings of loss and sadness. Every time it's too hot or too cold in the apartment, I think about our little rodent.

That's it for me: no more pets.

I can't wait for winter break. All of us are getting a bit antsy around here. It's getting harder and harder to get my kids to practice piano these days, and their recital is only three weeks away. It's also getting harder to get homework done. It's not just the kids. I'm also struggling to stay focused. Every time I start to think about my Thanksgiving menu, my brain wanders.

We're not planning a huge Thanksgiving dinner; a few close friends, a few stranded law school students. But, I can't get past turkey, stuffing, and sweet potato pie. When I start to think about soup and salads, my mind goes blank. At least I remembered to start defrosting the bird in the fridge. I'm thinking garlic roasted potatoes, blanched green beans or roasted brussel sprouts. Quinoa or wild rice? I'm imagining a cold cranberry relish or maybe a hot cranberry sauce served in a small baked pumpkin, or squash. I'm planning apple pie, maybe pecan? Pumpkin soup? Maybe that, too. Would a chocolate cake be overkill?

Either way, the cooking begins tomorrow!

Lost in the menu planning is the reminder to be thankful, so here goes: I'm thankful for my wonderful family who love me, support me, and at the worst of times, put up with me. I'm thankful for my friends who always make me feel like I'm not the only one who (fill in the blank), and that whatever it is, is perfectly normal. I'm thankful for the people in my life who make me laugh, and let me cry.

And I'm thankful for the furry rodent who shared his short life with us.

Rest in peace, little Chomp.

Family and fur

There's a slight flurry of snow outside. It's not cold enough to stick, but it is cold enough to send me indoors with the heat cranked up. I worry that I'll bake the pet hamster.

I worry an inordinate amount about our pet rodent. He's cute enough, a black little puff of fur with white paws, like a tuxedo-clad tennis ball. But it's not a matter of adoration. I don't adore the thing. I barely spend time with him. But if anything were to happen to him, I'd be crushed for my boy. So I worry if he has been fed adequately. I worry that his litter box is clean enough. I worry that it's too cold, or too hot. I worry that he smells bad.

It's not quite like having another child. I don't have the emotional investment, but I have lost a few hours of sleep making sure the heat was on and the food bowl filled. Tonight I made sure my kids were fed, bathed, and sent to bed on time. I made sure my son cleaned out the cage, refilled the water bottle, and bathed old Chomp. I panicked when the baby picked up the hamster in his ball and dropped them, hamster and ball. Chomp was fine, just a bit woozy. I was vexed to find his bath water was too cold. I picked him out of that bath and gingerly dried him, from pink nose to stubby tail. And in the process discovered, he is, in fact, a he.

A few weeks ago we had a wonderful visit with my mother-in-law. We went out for dinner, had a wonderful shabbat dinner together, and took the kids to a fundraising concert for their school. Each year their school hosts a string quartet made up of members of the CSO. This year they also offered babysitting for the little ones, and a "musical petting zoo" where the children got a chance to examine real stringed instruments, and even play them.

It was a delight for them to lay their hands on cellos and violins. My musical children were drawn to the instruments. My son sat through the entire concert in rapt attention, noticing every little detail of the performance. The instruments pulled him in, as well.

My baby was disappointed to be put into babysitting. Memories of her birthday adventure were fresh enough that she cried and cried and cried, "I want to go to the concert!" I gently explained. It's not that kind of a concert. There's no singing or dancing. You have to sit very still and just listen. The message sunk in as she was lured to an arts and crafts project. But even she got a chance to explore the "petting zoo" and that sufficed. A lovely time was had by all in the end.

Granma Thuthin's visit was too short, as usual. She went home just in time for the elections. We were all abuzz with the impending changing of the guards. But even here, in deep blue Chicago, stomping grounds for the president elect, the discourse was heated. Despite the fact the junior senator from Illinois won an overwhelming majority of the Jewish vote, here in our little Orthodox enclave, a very different picture emerged.

My kids took it all in stride at school where they were clearly in the minority in support of the Democratic nominee. My son proudly stood up against kids who insisted Obama was an Arab terrorist. "No he's not!" My son countered. And in his election essay for school he reported that McCain was "too old" to run again. Hmmm... I pondered innocently as my husband glowered at me, I wonder where he got that idea?

With the elections over, everything seems to have gone back to normal, not excluding my children's scholastic experiences. A few days after the elections, we had parent teacher conferences. Immediately after I finished teaching, I picked up my baby, swung by the pizza parlor, picked up a pie, and sped downtown to the school. In order to save time, my husband decided to take the bus and meet me there. Unfortunately, he got on the wrong bus, and came much later, frazzled and tired.

I met with the first grade teachers first, and was pleased to hear all of the wonderful things they had to say about my creative, brilliant, sweet child (ptui, ptui, hamza, hamza, bli ayin hara'ah!). I smiled, nodded, and swelled with naches. We fed the kids their pizza, and dashed back and forth between conferences and checking on our tired, grumpy, and squirrely offsprings, and wondered, are these the same kids they're talking about upstairs?

Our son's conferences went as expected. He was described by all his teachers as brilliant, sweet, creative, disorganized. We nodded in understanding. Yes, we've heard all of this before. He forgets to bring home homework, or if he remembers to do it, forgets to turn it in. He sits staring at a blank sheet of paper for the entire period unable to start on a writing assignment. Please, tell us something we haven't heard countless times. And as with many times before, we came to the same conclusion: we'll keep working on it.

But this year, the teacher threw a curve ball at us. "You know," she said pointedly, "next year he'll be in middle school with seven classes. It will be a lot harder for him to get away with his spacing out." In that moment, the world around me began to spin furiously, and oxygen became scarce. My heart pounded, and my ears rang.

I'm going to be the mother of a middle schooler?

All my efforts at freezing time have failed. The "hip hop aerobics" classes I'm taking from a petite, taut, tattooed, college coed only serve to make me feel older and more out of it than ever. I don't recognize the music, and I can't even begin to perform the dance moves she so effortlessly demonstrates. She twists, I trip. She shimmies, I create a disturbance in the atmosphere. I try to incorporate these hip young moves into the step aerobics classes I'm teaching my seventh and eighth graders, but they just shake their heads and giggle. It's no use.

I try not to think about it and focus on my own children, how they're blossoming, growing, and thriving in the creative environments we've nurtured for them. My daughter is a budding fashionista, creating amazing garments from paper, markers and tape.

My two oldest are still taking piano lessons and preparing for their next recital. My baby is taking her "creative movements" class quite seriously, shuffling and plie-ing away once a week in her tutu and tights. Big sister is having a blast in her "hip hop and jazz" class. They're not doing too many dance moves, but the girls are so smitten with their adorable, young, teacher, Mr. Peter, that they stretch, work their abs, and jump around in glee.

This past week, my son has also begun a dance class taught by Mr. Peter, called "for boys only". It's an uproarious forty-five minutes of jumping, sliding, spinning, and cartwheeling. Very little of it resembles dance, but the boys are getting a chance to expel a tremendous amount of shpilkes. He's having a blast, and hopefully, developing some coordination and strength in the process. Somehow, this chaotic maelstrom of movement will be channeled into a performance by the summer. I take it as a matter of faith.

Thanksgiving is around the corner. Once again we are trying to cobble together a large enough crowd of law students and friends to make it feel like family time. And once again, I'm thinking pies. Winter break follows closely on its heels, and we'll be looking at one more semester of law school to go. I'm trying not to hold my breath. The graduation date has been published, and before long this whole adventure will come to an end.

I'm going to be the wife of a lawyer?

Getting out and getting on

November snuck up on me like a toddler on the war path, grabbing me behind the knees and knocking me flat.

Where on Earth has the time gone?

Time has flown since we bid another Jewish holiday season a fond adieu. I slipped away one Sunday afternoon, leaving my husband with soccer chauffeur duty, and hopped on a bus downtown to attend my cousin's wedding. The bus ride was fascinating. We meandered through mostly unfamiliar territory, much of it charming and trendy. My heart skipped a beat as I passed a bar festooned with my beloved alma mater The University of Texas Longhorns banners, and a longhorn flag displayed proudly outside. A sign proclaimed this establishment as the official home of the "Texas Exes". I filed the information away in my mental database for future reference.

I passed a Trader Joe's, home of the best parve chocolate chips ever.

I passed many stores and pubs that sparked my imagination, and brought me in to a nostalgic reverie. Aaah, to be young, single, and carefree again! It was an odd thought to have on the way to a wedding.

This was the second wedding in several months connected to my dear Tio Julio, of blessed memory. The first was over the summer when I celebrated the wedding of my adorable little cousin to an even more adorable young woman who is crushing me in Facebook Scrabble at this very moment. It was a wedding that dispelled the pain of loss with it's beauty and joy. Julio passed away over ten years ago and didn't get to see his baby under the chuppah.

Nor did he get to see his second wife's son marry. The first wedding was fraught with emotional intricacies, a by-product of a bitter divorce. This one carried cultural complications. It was an interfaith affair, a blending of several families and cultures. The venue was industrial and chic, with exposed brick, steel, and cement. It was small and cozy and suited the mood. The wedding was lovely, but bittersweet. I was reunited with a family that had taken me in for holidays a decade ago when I was in Boston. It was hard to see the patriarch of the family, once a brilliant man, stricken down by Parkinson's disease, and the son, succumbing to an incurable cancer, surrounded and celebrating with his beautiful family. I left the wedding filled with joy and sadness. I drifted home on the bus gazing past bars and shops feeling the passage of time more acutely than ever.

I made a new friend over the past few weeks. We had met before and had a few tenuous connections through mutual friends, but we finally followed through on our promises to get together. My new friend is as right brained as it gets. She is a musician, a piano teacher, a writer and an artist. I marvel at her wealth of talent, in contrast to the dearth of my own. Our lives are so different. She is a divorcee with no children, living alone in a beautiful home, getting along in life despite a debilitating disease. She travels in the beautiful intersections of life where music, art and language meld together. I live in a small clutter of toys, books, and crayon drawings. My music is the sing-songy minuets of giggling children, the dramatic rhapsodies of full-on melt downs, and the fugues of bickering and arguments.

Yet, we have found much common ground, sharing an obsession with politics and a mutual therapeutic need to get out of the house. Last weekend she treated me to a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, the Inca Trail. I was mesmerized, not by the "multi-media" screen that hung over the stage flashing photographs, art, and colorful images (it looked like a fancy screensaver to me), but by the percussion section scurrying around, playing a wide array of instruments in the background. The hall was packed with very hip, young, Latin Americans, and my ears delighted as much to the diverse genres of music, as to the Spanish language all around.

Tomorrow I'm taking my mother-in-law and the big kids to a fundraising concert for their school. Members of the CSO will be performing, and they will have a musical instrument "petting zoo" for the kids during the intermission. I am pleased to be exposing my children to classical music. My husband is pleased to have us out of his hair.

My husband will spend the day working on yet another paper. It is said that the third year of law school is the easiest, but I haven't seen any evidence of this assertion yet. All I know is that November has sneaked up on us all. The temperatures keep lifting half-heartedly, and dropping with a thud, then rising a bit more before I dig out warmer coats again. Deadlines appear for my husband like a cop parked out over a hill, sending adrenalin and stress hormones coursing through his body. It's all a blur to me. Holidays blending into simchas blending into nights out with a friend, and a day out with the kids. Soccer season begins in the hot sun, and ends in a windy chill. And I just get older and fatter.

Time keeps marching on and gravity pulls me along with it.