Legacy Writing 365:97

This is another of the photos I’m grateful to have found in my mother’s collection.

She was living in an apartment on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa (I think that entire complex might have been destroyed in the tornados of 2011). Tom was still at Alabama, and I was living and working outside Huntsville. So I’d drive to spend weekends with her and get to see Tom, too. In this photo, I’m still in my pajamas and clearly have not brushed my hair–so Tom must have showed up early in the morning. We’re playing with my hamster, Houdini, who I usually called Dini.

For such a small animal, he was loaded with personality. I was living alone, and he was the best company. I’d walk in the door from work and start talking to him and he’d run like crazy on his hamster wheel. For some reason, I wasn’t using my antique bed then–maybe I didn’t have a double mattress and boxsprings–so my bed was two bunk beds pushed together to make a queen-sized bed (Terri will remember them; they were hand-me-downs from her stepsons). I’ve never liked being alone in a place when I sleep, so I’d put Dini’s cage on the other bunk bed and fall asleep to the sound of him running on his wheel, shifting his bedding around, or playing with his toys. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d lie on my side and tell him stories, and I swear he understood every word I was saying. I never dreamed I’d have a friend from the rodent family, but he was incredible.

Houdini was the reason I gave Keelie a hamster in A Coventry Christmas, naming her hamster after my late dog Hamlet. I didn’t know until my friend Lynn B told me that writer Janet Evanovich had already beat me to the hamster pal idea by giving her character Stephanie Plum a hamster named Rex. I considered changing Hamlet to a different animal, but my loyalty to Houdini stopped me. Instead, as a nod to Rex and his creator, I let Keelie stumble on one of Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books and tell Hamlet about him.