The Squeaky Wheel...

When I was in second grade I got a hamster from a litter of hamsters born to our class pet. They were long haired, fuzzy and cute from a distance:  I named him (it could have been a her for all I knew) Buddy. In my second grade way I really hated Buddy because he bit me the first day I got him. I tossed him across the room and my mom had to find him and put him back in his cage. Wearing rubber gloves and swearing she tossed my room and complained about having to touch what she at the time regarded as a rat. In Buddy’s short tenure on this earth we had a pretty lukewarm relationship. I fed him and gave him water, admittedly not as often as I probably should have or he might have lived longer, and watched him through the glass of his cage as he did hamster things. In stereotypical hamster form Buddy had a wheel in his cage that he loved to run on…at night when I tried to sleep. He never touched the damn thing during the day, but he’d run for hours on it at night. Are hamsters nocturnal, where was Wiki in second grade? The incessant squeaking kept me from sleeping on a number of occasions and I would lie in my bed and curse the day Buddy was born; both for biting me and for running his stupid wheel. This morning I got on my bike and my front wheel began to squeal in a manner I’ve not heard before from the Cannondale, but one vaguely reminiscent of Buddy’s wheel. All the way to work, squeak, squeak, squeak: the bearings must need lubing. The cold night and excessively heavy, damp, morning air must have finally caused the nearly 20 year old hubs to start seizing. The whole way to work as I rolled up behind cars and passed people walking through neighborhoods I cursed my obnoxiously loud bike and how conspicuous it made me feel, very similarly to how I cursed Buddy those nights in bed. Unless there’s a miracle or the angel of Buddy comes down from hamster heaven to fix my sticking bearings, I’ll squeak the entire way home tonight as well. Buddy’s angel probably doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me anyway: he did bite me and I did subsequently toss him and now he's haunting my wheel so I guess we’re even. Stupid wheel: I hate the sound of squeaking and apparently always have.