Ginny

Lester and I really wanted to have a pet Hamster. I don't know what it is with little boys and rodents but at this point in our lives we had it bad. One day Dad came home with two Guinea Pigs. I had never thought of getting a Guinea Pig but this was great. Sadly, one of the Guinea Pigs died that very first night but the remaining one came to be known as Ginny the Guinea Pig. The beauty of a Guinea Pig was that they couldn't escape quite so easily so instead of forcing Ginny to live in a cage we created a corral out of a corner of our bedroom. We laid down a sheet of plywood and built a wall about a foot high around it. Inside this corral Ginny had all the joys a Guinea Pig could want. Eventually we thought we would expand Ginny's horizons and we built a tunnel that led into the next room where we had another large corral. The tunnel passed through the wall through a heat duct.

Ginny enjoyed life for quite some time but one day she disappeared. It was very mysterious. There was no sign of escape and I had know idea where she had gone. Finally I gave up looking for her and accepted the fact that if she was dead we would surely smell her eventually. I didn't have to wait long. A couple days after Ginny's disappearance one end of the house began to smell very bad. After some investigation I realized that smell was coming from a heat vent in the utility room. At this point it became obvious that Ginny had chewed a hole in the wall of her tunnel that passed through the heat vent. The heat ducts in our bedroom on the second floor came straight up from the basement so Ginny had obviously fallen down the heat duct making this a two story fall.

Ginny had apparently survived the fall and managed to wander some distance from the place she had fallen. I mapped out the heat ducts and realized that if I could smell her in the utility room but not in the kitchen then she had to be in this one particular part of the ducting. There was no convenient place to separate the duct so I cut a hole large enough to put my head in the duct and with a flashlight I took a look. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at but there right in front of me was what looked like a hairy pancake. I got a putty knife and scraped poor Ginny off the duct. Due to the condition of the body, the funeral was a closed casket and we ceremoniously dumped Ginny into the garbage can.

The next day was mutual and we were walking to mutual with Susan Olsen. The Olsen's had a dog named Tip and Tip loved to roam the neighborhood. Susan was telling us that Tip had dragged home this gross rotten animal. I don't think I told her about the fate of Ginny but it seems that Tip had managed to drag Ginny's remains out of the garbage can and dragged her home. It was really disgusting. As much as I love animals and pets I just can't look at Guinea Pigs the same any more.