Take Me With You

Matt’s hamster Grover isn’t really a hamster. I’m not sure what he is exactly. But here’s a faithful description of what I’ve witnessed. (Ariel will verify it because she was there.)

Here’s the background. Every night Matt moves Grover’s cage to the dining room when he goes to bed because hamsters are semi-nocturnal and spend most of the night running their wheels, which is very noisy. You might not think it’s a big deal, but hamsters have been known to run 8 miles a night—in a wheel that measures 6 inches in diameter. That’s a lot of noisy running.

But, back to Grover. He was in his cage on the dining room floor. Ariel and I decided we needed a bag of popcorn to share while we watched a movie so we headed to the kitchen. We glanced into Grover’s cage. Grover was sitting in his wheel. But not just sitting, he was sitting on his rear-end with his legs hanging over the edge of the wheel and his hands out in front of him, holding a piece of food. He didn’t look any different than a person, except for the hairy body and beady eyes. Then, he had the audacity to look at us and tilt his head. Ariel and I both said, “Did you see that?!”

We chattered all through the popcorn popping. On our way back to the movie, we peeked into Grover’s cage. Now he was walking around. Not on his four paws. He was walking on his two hind feet like any normal biped. In other words, like a person. Once again, we locked eyes, and if I didn’t know better I was sure he was going to say, “What, you’ve never seen a hamster walk?”

I’ve been thinking about it for days now. I do believe that Grover’s a hamster. But he’s not any hamster, he’s a Narnian hamster—I think he ran past the lamppost without thinking and got stuck in our world. And I’m hoping that one night when no one’s around and I whisper, “I believe in Aslan too” that he’ll take me back with him.