Blue Moon Blog

Not being a true-blue animal lover, I like other people’s pets. For years, it had been easy to avoid all that comes with pet ownership. But that changed since it became clear my two daughters are Animal Girls. We’ve had to discuss and compromise as a family to figure something that would work for everybody. First it was a gecko lizard, then fish, but Laura still wanted something cute and cuddly. I’m not a cat fan, and we don’t want to care for a dog, so we settled on the next obvious choice: a rat.

We had the opportunity to do a beta test with different animals Laura brought home from school that we’d watch over the weekend. I found guinea pigs weird and smelly, rabbits the same, and had bad experiences with gerbils and hamsters when I was younger. But when Laura brought home a white albino rat with red eyes named Icebreaker, we were surprised how easy and clean rats were. Icebreaker visited us 3-4 weekends, and it became clear to us a pet rat was in our future.

Patches joined us in the Summer of 2005. The girls had him cuddling, rolling inside a ball all around the house, and Laura trained him to go from the living room all the way upstairs to her room and his cage. He was dressed as a CowRat, walked around the neighborhood for Halloween as Ratula (Laura was a cat that year), and Mary made for him his own Santa hat, which he wore in his most famous appearance on our Christmas card that year. He really became a part of the family, even though Mary and I were still sometimes creeped out by his long tail, which would get us thinking “sewer.”

Laura and Emily had grown quite attached to Patches, and kids in the neighborhood loved him, too. One day Emily and her friend Ashley came running in the house telling me Patches was lost. We ran out to the woods and found Laura standing there bawling in the middle of the woods behind our house. He’d apparently crawled out her pocket. I figured he was gone for good. Somehow, I calmed her down and all the noisy commotion that everyone was making in desperate and frantic searches for poor Patches. And in the quiet Laura heard him sneeze. She found him tucked in a crevice under a tiny hill. Needless to say, whenever she took him outside again, she made sure it was under strict and controlled circumstances.

Early last Fall, Patches caught an infection out of nowhere, was knocked on his side wheezing and looked to be checking out. He was over two years old, so that’s about right for a rat, but they can live as long as 3 1/2 years in some cases (longer, like 5-7, but that’s an extreme exception). With the girls just having left for their second day of the new school year, Mary took Patches to the doctor, and I didn’t think he was going to make it before they returned from school. But with tender loving care, Laura and Mary nursed him back to health. He had antibiotics, whatever food and water he would take from an eyedropper. That first night when he was sick, I fashioned for him a Tinker Toy steam tent, and neighborhood kids visited him for a rat vigil. The next day, Laura came home from school to find he had just stopped breathing, but somehow Mary massaged him back, and he was over the hurdle.

The same infection returned about a month later, and Patches was too weak to hold it off again and died. That night we held a funeral in the backyard. Patches was obviously loved as his service was well-attended. About ten kids and five adults were there to see him off. Mary fashioned for him a little gold pillow, and we nestled his little rat body in a customized wooden, decorated casket (rat-sket) built by some boys down the block, in a very thoughtful gesture. We closed it up, and all the kids said a few words remembering Patches, each tossing a shovelful of dirt to help bury him.

Laura was really torn up during and after for some time. It hit her really hard, and she took what time she needed to grieve. Several months later now, she’s decided it’s time to fill the hole in her heart.

Next: Meet the New Rats, not the same as the Old Rat.