Several weeks ago my family

had the privilege of entertaining Butterfinger, Mrs. Fairrel's third grade

class pet, for the weekend. Butterfinger is a long-haired guinea pig and

a magnificent animal.

I had never even heard of a

long-haired guinea pig until my son Brendan began describing her to me

the week that his Kedron classroom adopted her from a first grade classroom

that had developed allergies to her remarkable coiffure. I would call

her covering fur, but that would simply not be a true representation of

the facts.

When I first laid eyes on her

when I went to pick her up the Friday of the weekend we were to enjoy

her, I was stunned. She was the prettiest little thing I'd ever seen.

When I say "long-haired," I mean that she has hair a good four

or five inches long.

The very first thing I wanted

to do was to put a ribbon in this silky tuft of hair that hangs like bangs

over her delicate face. Brendan said that that's what everybody says when

they see her the first time. She is the color of caramel and cream. She

is the Marilyn Monroe of guinea pigs pure glamour and understated sophistication.

And just like Marilyn, she is terribly shy.

When Brendan began telling

us about her before it was our turn to have her over for the weekend,

he was visibly animated himself. He said that she lived in this igloo

like the igloos people sometimes buy for dogs. I couldn't quite picture

that, but when she came to our house I saw what he meant.

She has this little plastic

igloo inside her cage that she retreats to when she's feeling adored to

excess and must partake of a little privacy. When you bring her treats,

like lettuce or carrots or apples, she is so swift about snatching her

midday morsels into the igloo that if you blink, you'll miss her furtive

feast.

Before she came, Brendan and

Carrie and I were anticipating her arrival after school one day at the

kitchen table. I mistakenly called her Butterscotch, a symptom of a middle-aged

affliction that causes me to refer to rubber bands as Band-aids and toothbrushes

as hair brushes. I thought my two youngest children were going to fall

down laughing. Thereafter we called her Butterscotch just for fun when

we were in need of a giggle.

Brendan was talked in to letting

her run around his room out of her cage by my oldest daughter, Caylin.

We had hosted Comet, Carrie's class guinea pig, several weeks prior and

he had loved having the run of her room.

We quickly discovered that

Butterfinger was much more skittish than Comet, and when we tried to approach

her to put her back in her cage, she scampered as fast as lightening under

the bed or the cedar chest or anywhere that we weren't. Ultimately it

took two grown adults, my husband and myself, crawling around on hands

and knees to coax her back in to her cage, which ironically is where she

probably wanted to be anyway.

My 2-and-a-half-year-old nephew

Riley who was visiting with his mom and my sister-in-law, Sharon, from

Los Angeles, demonstrating the astute wisdom that only 2-year-olds can

possess, called her "kitty pig," which was of course an apt

description. So here we were, my husband and I, crawling around on all

fours in Brendan's small room bumping rumps and calling, "Here kitty,

kitty, kitty ... come here, kitty ... here, pretty kitty."

It was a few weeks later after

all of our guests had returned to their respective homes that it dawned

on me. God is a comedian.

On the day that God created

weather phenomena, as though catching a creative tail wind, he must have

finished up early and moved on to animals that were scheduled for the

next day. Somehow he must have kicked up quite a wind as he was hurrying

the weather conditions out the door and stirred up a little cyclone. Probably

before anyone knew what was happening, things must have gotten mixed up.

I can hear it now God saying, "Hey, you got kitties in my guinea

pigs," and the Word saying, "You got guinea pigs in my kitties."

And so it must have been on that day that the ancestors of the magnificent

Butterfinger came to be. And who said God didn't have a sense of humor.

So, if now and again you find

yourself playing host or hostess to somebody's "kitty pig,"

or making up animal origin folklore, as in the case of Mrs. Carey's eighth

grade English students at Fayette Middle School, remember this little

tale I've spun and wonder if it's all true, or maybe a little embellished

for special effect.

[Amy Riley lives in Peachtree

City and writes occasional columns for The Citizen. E-mail her at [email protected].]