Wednesday, April 3, 2002
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Wednesday, April 3, 2002 |
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'Kitty pig' makes indelible impression By AMY RILEY Several weeks ago my family had the privilege of entertaining Butterfinger, Mrs. Fairrel's third grade class pet, for the weekend. Butterfinger is a long-haired guinea pig and a magnificent animal. I had never even heard of a long-haired guinea pig until my son Brendan began describing her to me the week that his Kedron classroom adopted her from a first grade classroom that had developed allergies to her remarkable coiffure. I would call her covering fur, but that would simply not be a true representation of the facts. When I first laid eyes on her when I went to pick her up the Friday of the weekend we were to enjoy her, I was stunned. She was the prettiest little thing I'd ever seen. When I say "long-haired," I mean that she has hair a good four or five inches long. The very first thing I wanted to do was to put a ribbon in this silky tuft of hair that hangs like bangs over her delicate face. Brendan said that that's what everybody says when they see her the first time. She is the color of caramel and cream. She is the Marilyn Monroe of guinea pigs pure glamour and understated sophistication. And just like Marilyn, she is terribly shy. When Brendan began telling us about her before it was our turn to have her over for the weekend, he was visibly animated himself. He said that she lived in this igloo like the igloos people sometimes buy for dogs. I couldn't quite picture that, but when she came to our house I saw what he meant. She has this little plastic igloo inside her cage that she retreats to when she's feeling adored to excess and must partake of a little privacy. When you bring her treats, like lettuce or carrots or apples, she is so swift about snatching her midday morsels into the igloo that if you blink, you'll miss her furtive feast. Before she came, Brendan and Carrie and I were anticipating her arrival after school one day at the kitchen table. I mistakenly called her Butterscotch, a symptom of a middle-aged affliction that causes me to refer to rubber bands as Band-aids and toothbrushes as hair brushes. I thought my two youngest children were going to fall down laughing. Thereafter we called her Butterscotch just for fun when we were in need of a giggle. Brendan was talked in to letting her run around his room out of her cage by my oldest daughter, Caylin. We had hosted Comet, Carrie's class guinea pig, several weeks prior and he had loved having the run of her room. We quickly discovered that Butterfinger was much more skittish than Comet, and when we tried to approach her to put her back in her cage, she scampered as fast as lightening under the bed or the cedar chest or anywhere that we weren't. Ultimately it took two grown adults, my husband and myself, crawling around on hands and knees to coax her back in to her cage, which ironically is where she probably wanted to be anyway. My 2-and-a-half-year-old nephew Riley who was visiting with his mom and my sister-in-law, Sharon, from Los Angeles, demonstrating the astute wisdom that only 2-year-olds can possess, called her "kitty pig," which was of course an apt description. So here we were, my husband and I, crawling around on all fours in Brendan's small room bumping rumps and calling, "Here kitty, kitty, kitty ... come here, kitty ... here, pretty kitty." It was a few weeks later after all of our guests had returned to their respective homes that it dawned on me. God is a comedian. On the day that God created weather phenomena, as though catching a creative tail wind, he must have finished up early and moved on to animals that were scheduled for the next day. Somehow he must have kicked up quite a wind as he was hurrying the weather conditions out the door and stirred up a little cyclone. Probably before anyone knew what was happening, things must have gotten mixed up. I can hear it now God saying, "Hey, you got kitties in my guinea pigs," and the Word saying, "You got guinea pigs in my kitties." And so it must have been on that day that the ancestors of the magnificent Butterfinger came to be. And who said God didn't have a sense of humor. So, if now and again you find yourself playing host or hostess to somebody's "kitty pig," or making up animal origin folklore, as in the case of Mrs. Carey's eighth grade English students at Fayette Middle School, remember this little tale I've spun and wonder if it's all true, or maybe a little embellished for special effect. [Amy Riley lives in Peachtree City and writes occasional columns for The Citizen. E-mail her at AmyRileyOpEd@aol.com.]
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