The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (36 page)

As Fisher walked me to the door of the building, a sudden rain shower sent sheets of water across the parking lot. We stood around for a while beneath the awning, waiting for the rain to let up, and I asked Fisher if he remembered meeting my father.

“Of course,” he said. “I went out to Tumblebrook Farm several times. That was quite a place you people had.”

“What was my dad like?”

Fisher’s answer surprised me. “He was a very soft-spoken man,” he said. “Very gentle and never in a hurry.”

“Do you remember anything else about him?”

Fisher grinned. “That man was absolutely in love with gerbils,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so immersed in his work.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “That’s my dad.”

O
UR
family, like so many, is separated by geography now. My brother Philip studied Russian history, stopping just short of a doctorate. He now works at a large university, happily managing other people’s websites while dabbling in passions that range from playing the banjo to parsing sentences in Old Norse.

My brother Donald moved to England for a job twenty years ago and is there still with his wife and two daughters. Contrary to all of our worst predictions for his future, Donald
managed to make it through technical college studying biomedical engineering and, through sheer grit, intelligence, and energy, worked his way up to the post of technical sales manager for a large software company. His territory now covers much of Europe and Asia, and he makes so much money that he can say, with authority, that the more degrees you earn from universities, the less money you’re likely to make, holding my brother Phil and me up as prime examples. All three of us live in antique farmhouses.

Until his death on January 10, 2009, my father lived in South Carolina with my mother, in a modest brick ranch house across the street from an elementary school. They were divorced shortly before he sold Tumblebrook Farm to Charles River, when the cumulative stress of their twenty-eight-year marriage finally was too much to bear. They spent eighteen years apart, and my father was married to another woman for most of that time. Then, quite suddenly, Dad left his second wife and my parents decided to marry again.

“Better the devil you know,” Mom says, summing up their situation.

Before his retirement from gerbil farming, Dad succeeded in accomplishing one last goal that was close to his heart: in 1987, he provided four pairs of his gerbils to Dr. Sigmund T. Rich in Los Angeles, the veterinarian who first encouraged my father to film gerbil seizures and write up his observations. Dr. Rich, whose life’s work involved cataloging the many different strains of gerbils in China, hand-carried my dad’s Tumblebrook Farm gerbils to Chinese researchers.

Afterward, Dr. Rich wrote to my father:

H
ALFWAY
into the afternoon at the American Gerbil Society show, there is an exciting announcement: “The Gerbil Olympics will begin in five minutes!”

Tension builds fast as entrants scurry to line up their cages along a row of tables by the windows. Each owner is given a small paper cup to hold over the cage. At the count of “One, two, three!” the cups are dropped into the cages. The gerbils start chewing with great zeal, whittling down the cups at an amazing speed. The winner is the gerbil able to demolish more paper cup than any other competitor in the span of two minutes. As I watch the gerbil contenders chew, I think about how much my father would have loved being here.

When Aidan and his friends are finally ready to leave the gerbil show, they run down the sidewalk to the parking lot ahead of me. As the boys buckle their seat belts in the car, they talk about the animals and which ones they’d like as pets.

Jack wants a ferret because he’d like to set up a little hammock for it next to his bed. Patrick longs for a miniature hedgehog because the ones we saw at the show burrowed under bits of cloth called “hedgehog hats” and walked around like fuzzy turtles. Aidan announces that he liked the dwarf
hamsters best because he doesn’t know anybody else who has them. He’s already scheming, plotting out arguments that might convince his father and me to agree to let him breed a colony of dwarf hamsters in his room.

“I don’t want a gerbil, because I already know a lot about those,” he explains to his friends. “My grandfather used to raise them.”

“How many gerbils did your grandfather have?” Jack wants to know.

I glance into the rearview mirror and meet Aidan’s eyes. He grins at me. “Try to guess,” he says.

T
HE
author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of her agent, Richard Parks, the nicest man in New York, and of her friends, many of them writers and thoughtful critics despite the infinite demands of motherhood and jobs, especially Sharon Wright, Emily Ferrara, Susan Straight, Terri Giuliano Long, Elisabeth Brink, Virginia Smith, and Carla Panciera. I would also like to thank Jay Neugeboren, whose mentorship meant the world to me, and Lorraine Glennon, my first editor at
Ladies’ Home Journal
, who taught me more about writing than any graduate school could. I would like to extend a heartfelt thank-you to Julia Pastore, too, my clever, visionary, and thorough editor who helps writers see that some books can, and should, take a completely different shape from what we first had in mind. Finally, many thanks to members of the American Gerbil Society, especially to Donna Anastasi and Judith Block, for their own dedication to the remarkable gerbil and for their help in writing this book.

H
OLLY
R
OBINSON
has been a contributing editor at
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Parents
magazines, and her work has appeared in
American Baby, The Boston Globe, Family Circle, FamilyFun, Fitness, Good Housekeeping, More, Parenting, Shape
, and
WorkingMother
. She holds a B.A. in biology from Clark University and is a graduate of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In addition to her husband and their five children, she shares a home with two dogs, one cat, five fish, one gecko, and a Teddy Bear hamster. Visit her at
AuthorHollyRobinson.com
.

The names and identifying characteristics of some individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.

Copyright © 2009 by Holly Robinson

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Judith H. Block for permission to reprint the poem “Twilight on the Gobi” by Judith H. Block, copyright © 2003 by Judith H. Block,
http://www.geocities.com/Phoebe_art04
. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Holly, 1955–
   The gerbil farmer’s daughter / Holly Robinson. — 1st ed.
  1. Gerbils as pets—Anecdotes. 2. Gerbils—Breeding—Anecdotes.
  3. Robinson, D. G. (Donald Granville), 1928– 4. Robinson,
  Holly, 1955– I. Title.
  SF459.G4R63 2009
  636.935′83—dc22
  [B]                                                     2008051449

eISBN: 978-0-307-45982-4

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