By Rosemary Boeglin
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At the beginning of this school year I bought an albino hamster and I named him Boris. At first I was kind of scared of him. He had sharp little teeth and beady red eyes. He was unfamiliar to me and I was unfamiliar to him. The newfound responsibility made me uneasy and excited at the same time. Let’s call this the “freshman year” of our relationship.

After I became comfortable enough to pick him up without flinching, Boris and I became the best of friends. Since he lived in an aquarium on my desk, we spent quite a bit of time together. This was still the fun, get to know all the cute and interesting things you do, stage of our relationship. I found out that he grooms after eating and that he stuffs his cheeks with food from his bowl and deposits it in various parts of his abode. (These things might not sound cute, but they were adorable. Trust me). Even when he would keep me up at night running on his wheel I wouldn’t mind. It was a small price to pay for the relationship we were building as BFF’s. This was our “sophomore year” together.

By “junior year” it was more of a professional relationship. I was an attentive caretaker, making sure to clean his cage and change his water at appropriate intervals, but I was not as attentive of a friend. There were still times that I would snatch him from this strawberry, the oversized plastic fruit-shaped home he burrowed in, and play with him or slip him into my shirt pocket for essay-writing company. There were still occasions that I would put him in his travel home, a “bug-catcher” type container with mesh sides, and take him outside. But, they occurred less often than they once had. It wasn’t that I didn’t still love Boris; it was that he had become a sort of fixture in my life. He was just this nice thing that was there that I didn’t have to appreciate too much because I knew he wasn’t going anywhere. He was a good hamster, but that’s what I had become accustomed to. It didn’t feel quite as special or exciting anymore.

At the inception of the (actual) second semester in my senior year, my Boris-related habits changed slightly. I became more lax with changing his cage and giving him new chew toys. Nothing horrible, just a little late every now and then. I by no means abandoned my old friend; I just let more and more go. Instead of trying to go to bed earlier so that I would be able to fall asleep before he ran on his wheel, I would just take it out of his cage if he were preventing me from falling asleep. In essence, I was taking the easy way out of doing my job. I was falling a little behind in the duties that I had pledged myself to. I knew it; I just had a very difficult time caring enough to change my ways.

A month ago Boris died (or should I say graduated to heaven). I don’t know if it was because I started feeding him vegetables as a supplement to his hamster food diet (which is, for the record, encouraged by hamster-connoisseurs) or if it was because he lived in the pet store for a while before I bought him and hamsters don’t live very long. Either way, it was devastating. I loved Boris. He was as good of a hamster as a girl could ask for. But, I couldn’t help but to think that in some ways it was better this way. Things would have been complicated in terms of taking him to college with me or finding him a new home. As much as I loved him, I think he and I grew together and learned from one another until it was time for both of us to move on to the next stage in our lives.