Hamsta Gone Gangsta

It’s absurd that I found myself babysitting a hamster last month, but even more absurd that I lost her. Nina was born in a pet store only a block away from the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens. She had the lucky fortune of being scooped up by two of my closest friends, Chris and Lydia, who three years before, had met and fallen in love in an East Village bar. It was love at first sight.

Chris and Lydia say the same was true of their feelings for the hamster; that when they saw her deep, dark eyes and white fluffy exterior they just had to make her theirs. My guess is that it had less to do with love and more to do with an alcohol-induced whim, or at the very least, a parenthood test-drive. Regardless, they genuinely cared for Nina and bought her all the accoutrements a hamster could want. Nina’s new home was a hamster dream palace – colorful tubes snaking across Chris and Lydia’s Brooklyn apartment. Chris took photographs of Nina while Lydia routinely fluffed up her sleeping quarters.

So when they told me that they were leaving the city for a couple of weeks in mid-December and asked if Nina could stay with me in my East Harlem apartment, I naturally obliged.

“Of course,” I said with only slight trepidation.

Nina and I didn’t have much of a relationship. When I visited Brooklyn (which wasn’t often) she would often bite me when I picked her up.

“That’s just what she does,” my friends said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Nina’s mood was subdued on the night that Chris and Lydia packed up her party palace and brought her and her kibble to my apartment. She had never been to Harlem before, so perhaps she sensed that things were different uptown.

I had only been living here six months, so I understood any uncertainty that she might be feeling. I came to Harlem in the summer of ’05, lured by 1000 square feet, a dishwasher and a rent-stabilized lease. The close proximity to the East side and West side express trains sealed the deal.

“How often do I change her cage? What about feeding her?” I asked, putting pen to paper as Chris and Lydia began instructing me on the dos and don’ts of hamster care.

They told me that I should clean her cage only once over the two weeks she was here, check her water supply every day and not feed her any meat products. Oh, and she liked carrots.

They said their goodbyes to Nina and with that, Chris and Lydia walked out of my apartment. The door shut. It was just Nina and me.

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“You’re what!” my friend Purnima exclaimed the next day over lunch at Serafina. “Are you kidding me? That’s so random.”

I couldn’t agree with her more. But there it was. While I was diving into mozzarella, prosciutto and sangria, Nina was spinning around in her wheel uptown, her wood chips stinking up my pristine abode.

“Who has hamsters?!” she asked, baffled.

The two of us racked our brains, thinking back on our grade school friends and if any of them had hamsters. Purnima and I had been close for years. We grew up together in Indiana and she had come to New York directly out of college. She and her (now) husband had given Murphy and me a place to stay until I found my first apartment.

We came to the conclusion that we didn’t know anyone who had a hamster. Besides me.

“Fascinating,” she said. “Well, good luck with that.”

“Thanks,” I replied.

On my way uptown from lunch, I stopped at a bodega and picked up some carrots. When I returned home I gently took Nina out of her cage and placed her in my hand.

“You’re not in Brooklyn anymore, baby,” I said to her sweetly before she dug her tooth into my index finger.

“Dammit,” I muttered under my breath. “What the hell joy comes from a biting hamster? I just don’t understand.”

Back in the cage she went.

I had been dating someone about a week at that time, and it was high time that he and I had some private time together. He lived in Brooklyn and we were in Manhattan, so it seemed the obvious choice to come back to my place.

As I opened my apartment door, I realized that I had some explaining to do. He had never been to my place before, and a single woman with a small rodent isn’t sexy. I began babbling about the hamster and why I had her in my place.

“It’s my friends’,” I stammered, pointing at Nina. “They went overseas. Lydia is from Slovakia and they went home for the holidays. They asked me to watch her while they’re gone,” I said meekly.

“It’s okay if it’s yours,” he said smiling.

“No, it’s not mine,” I said defiantly. “Really. It’s not mine.”

“Okay. But, again, it’s okay if it’s yours,” he said, his grin widening.

I figured my best course of action on this was to walk away from the hamster and get out of this conversation. It was a lose-lose. Hamster isn’t sexy. We went into another room.

For the next couple of weeks, Nina and I settled into a routine. I woke up, gave her water, took her out of cage to play, she bit me, she went back in cage, I fed her a carrot.

We went on like this for two weeks. On New Year’s Eve, Chris and Lydia returned from their trip and called me.

“Welcome home,” I said excitedly. “She’s doing great and looking forward to getting back to Brooklyn.”

“We’re pretty beat,” Chris said. “Would it be okay if we picked her up on the 2nd?”

“No problem,” I replied. “Happy New Year.”

In the very early morning hours of January 2nd, 2006 I returned home from a late night out and checked in on Nina. I picked her up, told her that I had enjoyed having her here, but that her time in East Harlem was up. I put her back in the cage and I went to bed. That was the last time I saw her.

When I woke up at noon, she was gone. It’s unclear exactly how she got out; whether I didn’t lock the clasp properly on her cage or if she simply didn’t want to be a prisoner any longer and squeezed through the wires. If it’s the latter, more power to her. I can understand wanting to make a run for it, to seize an opportunity and giddy up out of the confines of ones environs.

One hears a lot these days about the gentrification of Harlem. Maybe Nina, in all her fuzzball glory, is part of that wave. She certainly looks every bit the part, the white snowball that she is. Sometimes when I walk down the street, men warmly refer to me as ‘snowbunny.’

“Hey snowbunny, you lost?” they say sheepishly.

“Nope,” I respond confidently. “I know exactly where I am.”

Being a minority in East Harlem hasn’t been a problem for me; perhaps because I always felt like a bit of an outsider growing up in Indiana, so home doesn’t feel like ‘home’ unless I’ve got one toe out the door. But for Nina, a move to East Harlem might not be the smoothest of transitions. She’s got the whole ‘rodent’ stigma working against her, and even if someone rescues her, I know that Nina is going to piss the person off with that nasty biting habit. Nina’s future is bleak, that I know. But I felt it important to mention her here; to alleviate some of my guilt and to dedicate this entry to Chris, Lydia and the Hamsta Gone Gangsta.

Soft Land

I was 30 years old when I first felt like I was coming home. I had been living in New York for almost a year, and was vacationing in the Caribbean with a boyfriend over the wintry New Year’s week. I was on the airplane returning to the city, tanned and tipsy from the two small bottles of Kahlua now stashed in the seat pocket in front of me, when I looked outside the window and sighed.

I felt sheer joy to be coming home to the city that I had been having a love affair with for the better part of my life. It was a sultry affair; a hot summer romance that I returned to each year. I needed it like one needs oxygen. My summer tryst fueled me through the ten arduous months I endured in Indiana. Each year from the age of 14, my mother thought she was sending me to summer camp in upstate New York, when actually summer camp was just a means to a New York City end. It was a tryst filled with mystery and adventure, and it fed something in me that I craved at my core. But at the end of each summer, at the first sign of the changing season, I would leave this city. I’d get on a plane and my heart would sink. I had to return home to a place that didn’t feel like home.

My rendezvous with New York continued in that way for years. When I was too old to be a camper, I returned as a camp counselor. When I outgrew camp altogether (at the age of 23!) I would come to the city to visit the friends I had made during those warm months. As I got older, my career as a journalist moved me first to Montana and then Virginia. Still, I knew that my life was to be in New York and felt stronger about making a home here than any career path I was on.

So I took a leap of faith and finally committed to this city on paper; I signed a lease for an apartment and was the proud renter of a 300 square foot, 1,700-dollar-a-month apartment. All I can say about those embarrassing numbers is that I didn’t know any better. And I was desperate. I came to New York with a king-size bed and a 75-pound golden retriever named Murphy; my Midwestern naiveté about Manhattan real estate was comical at best, a disaster at worst.

My dog refused to use the pavement as a bathroom. She demanded something soft under her paws, thus making close proximity to Central Park a must-have. Who could blame her? For five years she had squatted on terrific terrain; some of the most sensational soil in the country, really. She was only three months old when I got her in Montana. It was Big Sky country with even bigger bathroom potential. She quickly became accustomed to the vast expanses of the land - Yellowstone Park; Glacier National Forest; the Gallatin Canyon. Murphy was doing business on God’s country.

Suffice it to say, the cement jungle of NYC was tough on her. In the morning, after putting her leash on, she would literally pull me to the park. We raced by city canines happily relieving themselves on the NYC sidewalks, as my poor pup could barely hold it in. She was like a bat out of hell, crazed to be outdoors but unable to find a patch of grass. She would beeline to the West 72nd street entrance of the park and then – joy of all joys – a patch of grass. And just like that, my mild-mannered Murphy reappeared.

The king-size bed went into storage, because 1,700-dollars on Central Park West does not rent one a room that fits a king-size bed. I sold the beast to an Irishman in the West Village who I ended up dating, so it was a win-win as I ultimately didn’t have to say goodbye to the bed until I said goodbye to the relationship. So I happily lingered on my mattress until I was ready to fully embrace my sofa bed.

At night, I would unfold the mattress in the couch and Murphy would hop in. This lasted for about six months. The lack of space had initially been amusing, but by the six month point had become ludicrous. I had terrible guilt over leaving my large dog in such a small space each morning when I went to work. My mother, who lives outside of Cleveland, has plenty of space and generously offered to take Murphy until I settled in. I cried the day my mom drove off with her; Murphy had been my dog for five years and now she was gone.

The silver lining in her loss was that the real estate market opened up to me. I no longer had to find a pet-friendly, elevator building right off the park, so my search widened exponentially. I got an immense amount of pleasure from perusing the classifieds. I saw several apartments; most of them bad, a few were utter abominations. One, in particular, stands out: For $1,950, a small one-bedroom apartment with shower in kitchen and (shared) toilet down hallway. There wasn’t a bathroom sink in the apartment. One brushed one’s teeth in the kitchen sink. It was off Great Jones Street, in the Village; this, for a mere $1,950 a month.

Although desperate for even the tiniest bit more space, this time I knew better. This time, things would be different. This time, I would find a beautiful apartment big enough for a bed and a couch. This time, I would find a place that finally felt like home….

Bagel Back-Story

I’ve been looking for a bagel ever since I was born, but particularly since moving to East Harlem this past summer. It’s not like I had great bagels growing up; it was Lender’s Bagels or no bagels in Bloomington, Indiana. It was the 1970’s and all I knew from a bagel was that it was infinitely cooler than a slice of bread. The instant upgrade from the dense, hard stick of butter to the shiny silver tub of cream cheese made my heart beat faster. It was a creamy goodness no piece of toast deserved. And no rectangular piece of dough could compare to the circular one that enabled me to stick my tongue through its hole and taunt my younger brother, Andy.

All around me people were keen on English muffins; spreading jam on them and touting the benefits of the countless nooks and crannies. But I felt special that I was in on the bagel – like I was privy to some ancient secret that my family shared. I had always felt like an outsider in Indiana. The neighborhood kids looked at me strangely when they learned that I didn’t celebrate Easter or eat ham or go to church. I felt uncomfortable about being different from them. Like all kids, I wanted to fit in. But I consoled myself by thinking that if having Hanukah meant having the bagel, I’d forego Christmas any day.

My mother would buy dozens of Lender’s Bagels at the local Kroger grocery and then tuck them away in our additional freezer in the garage.

“You never know when you might need a bagel,” my mother would say completely deadpan, as she waited impatiently for the doughnut-shaped rolls to thaw.

Little did I know how right she was; that I would, in fact, spend most of my life searching for the elusive bagel.

It came as a surprise when my parents told me that we would be leaving Indiana. I was five years old when we packed up our Hoosier homestead and moved to northern Israel, where my father took sabbatical and taught economics at the Technion in Haifa. My parents rented an apartment on Mount Carmel situated down the street from a magnificent bread factory with a storefront bakery. The first morning I awoke in Israel, I rose to a smell so intoxicating, so doughy and pure that I just knew it had to be a bagel. It was like no bagel I had ever smelled before.

I went into my parent’s bedroom and begged them to take me to the factory. The anticipation of that chewy goodness was too much to bear. It had been a couple of days since my last bagel and I needed a fix. Now. My parents humored me but I could tell they were worried. I viewed their furrowed brows as concern over what had become a mild obsession; the bagel had taken on a life of its own. I was consumed with bagel desire.

While they were getting dressed I contemplated why the bagel was so delectable when its ingredients didn’t amount to much: mainly water, yeast, sugar and salt.

“How could it be?” I thought. There was something bigger than the bagel at play here. I needed to finagle the bagel to get to its core.

Apparently, in the 1860s a Jewish baker in Austria created a special hard roll in the shape of a riding stirrup. He made the roll to thank the king of Poland for protecting his countrymen from Turkish invaders. After gaining popularity in Poland, bagels eventually made their way to Russia where they were sold on strings. The ring-shaped objects were said to bring good luck and have magical powers.

“Hmmm…” I thought as my parents wearily put their shoes on. Had the bagel cast some magical spell on me? Was each nosh bringing me closer to my past? I had great grandparents, after all, from Eastern Europe. Maybe it was here in the promised land that they were going to contact me through the promised bagel; to show me something I was unable to see through the cornfields in Indiana.

I couldn’t get to the bread factory fast enough. My mouth watering, I tore down the street as my parents called after me to slow down. The smell intensified as I got closer. When I finally arrived, I couldn’t see straight. Visions of bagel had blinded me to the rows of challah bread that sat before me on the counter.

I scanned the long loaves of bread; looking for something, anything round and edible. The Israeli behind the counter had no idea what a bagel even was, let alone had any patience for a five-year-old American who was about to start crying. There was no bagel. I was devastated, and the situation got worse when I inquired about my old faithful, Lender.

“Oh honey,” my mother said soothingly. “I think we’re going to have a little trouble finding a bagel in Israel.”

“How can this be?” I wailed.

She took my hand and explained that the bagel was popular in Europe among Jewish residents, but it was in America that the bagel had become widely popular, especially in New York.

“New York?” I said, not fully understanding the gravity of her words.

“New York,” she said strongly. “That’s really where the best bagels are, honey.”

And with that, I moved to New York. Well, yes, I moved to New York but it took me awhile to get here. About 24 years from the time I stood sobbing at the bread factory, to be exact. But I did it. And now, here in the midst of a New York City bagel bonanza, I find myself having a ‘little trouble’ finding a bagel….