Sometimes I lose my ball under the couch. It gets lodged underneath just out of reach of my long nails. It makes me sad because I can see the ball and I can remember what it was like to have it, but it’s just too far away to reclaim. The taste of the soft rubber lingers in my mouth and I can almost feel the ball squeak between my teeth if I think about it hard enough. Thoughts and memories are funny in this way. If I could just forget the ball was under the couch then life could continue without much of a fuss about my loss. Instead, I try to find a nice sunny place to lay down and distract my thoughts with the fish tank or the fly behind blinds or sounds of possible dogs outside, but my thoughts always seem to meander back to my ball. For example, I start to think about the fly behind the blinds which reminds of my Dad’s pant’s fly (which is always down) and thinking about my Dad leads me to his best friend Uncle Paul and then BALL! It goes on like this for hours…maybe minutes…time is a difficult concept. Tragically, there is nothing in the world I can do to get the ball from under the couch…on my own. See, I have these friends with really long, furless arms on whom I can rely on in these tough situations. They can understand what I need and want without my having to tell them anything. These people are, of course, my lovely Mother and Father and they always come to the rescue. Always! Even if they don’t get the ball from under the couch just having them around makes things a little better. You better believe that ball is still in the back of my mind, but it doesn’t consume me as it did when my parents are gone. It does help that they feed me and pat me on my rump which makes the painful memory of the lost ball dissipate a teeny weeny bit. I love them very much and at the end of the day I wish I could make those word sounds so I could tell them one simple thing: GET MY BALL FROM UNDER THE COUCH, YOU BEAN EATING CABBAGE HEADS!
-Hamory (it kind of looks/sounds like memory. Throw me a bone here. Literally. Throw me a bone!)
My Life as a Ham 