We used to have two guinea pigs. That’s terribly politically incorrect–nowadays, they want to be called cavies, and you don’t “have” them, they live with you. So, these two cavies used to live with us. For some reason they chose to live in a little wire-framed apartment on a tabletop in our house, and I chose to bring them food every day, keep their water bottle filled, trim their nails, and so forth.
They were very nice roommates. They were always thrilled when I came home from work–they lived upstairs on the landing, but as soon as they heard my footsteps downstairs they would start racing around in their little wire-framed apartment wheeking at the top of their lungs. I would go up and speak to them and check on their water bottle, and then go out in the vacant lot next door and harvest some food for them. They loved to eat kudzu and this wild sweet pea vine that grew in the vacant lot. You have to be grateful for any animal that likes to eat kudzu, and they ate a lot of it. I could stuff their apartment so full of kudzu that it was essentially 8 cubic feet of solid foliage, and they would eat it down to nothing. Well, nothing but a double handful of what looked like black rice. That process would take about an hour. I’d covered the floor of their apartment with foot-square floor tiles, and I could take the shop-vac and vacuum up all the black rice without even removing the cavies first, so they were extremely low maintenance.
When the cavies were little they were seriously full of energy, and the little wire-framed apartment was too little for them to expend it all. I was told exercise wheels weren’t good for them because they have weak backs, so what we would do is take them out of there and turn them loose in the hallway in a maze the kids would build out of oversized cardboard bricks. They seemed to love that maze–they’d race around in it, occasionally figuring out they could climb over the bricks or plow right through them, but mostly following the laid-out passageways. It was wonderfully calming to sit on the stairs and watch the cavies investigate a new maze.
One of my cow-orkers at the American Cancer Society had a cavy a lot like one of ours, a black-and-white long-haired one with a big lock of hair that fell over one eye, that she named Elvis. From time to time at work she’d tell me what Elvis was up to. One day, when we were both working embedded in the offices of Sapient, an agency we were using to redesign our website, she came in and was obviously in a very bad way. I asked her if everything was OK, and she wailed, “Oh, Fred, Elvis is dead!” and glommed onto me for a long comforting hug. All the Sapients were standing around looking mystified and I could practically see the thought bubbles over their heads. Did she just find out? Did she secretly know he was really alive until now? I never explained it to them.
I’m grateful those cavies lived with us as long as they did, and that there are cavies out there for other folks to live with. I’m sure they are helping lower their roommates’ blood pressure and bringing smiles to their faces right now.