If you had more time…

For centuries philosophers and scholars have debated about this notion of art imitating life, or whether it is actually the other way around. Some of the earliest works of the ancient philosophers like Aristotle seem to argue for the former, while later scholars like Oscar Wilde challenged this thinking, contending that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. In my opinion, and for most people who have lived long enough to experience life’s ups and downs, it’s probably a little bit of both.

Case in point, take the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. Granted, the musical uses some creative license to tell the story of Alexander Hamilton, but it is Hamilton’s unbelievable life story that makes for such great theater, so it is truly one of these instances where art imitates life and vice versa. The following story is about the profound impact Hamilton has had on the lives of me and my family, and a very personal connection that, turns out, also seems to transcend both life and art.

Prior to the summer of 2017 I didn’t know much about Hamilton, other than it was some sort of musical about the founding fathers that was getting rave reviews and earning critical acclaim on Broadway. That all changed one morning after waking up early while vacationing at our cabin on Houghton Lake, as I found myself sipping on cups of coffee and binge-watching YouTube videos to pass the time until the rest of my family woke up. Something you should know about me is that one of my secret little pleasures is watching YouTube videos. I especially love how YouTube’s custom search algorithms will suggest other videos it thinks you will like, ultimately leading you down the proverbial YouTube wormhole. On this particular morning my suggested search results included a video of one of my favorite comedians Jim Gaffigan who had recorded his kids singing “Salamander Hamilton” which is a parody of Hamilton’s opening number. I enjoyed it so much that I watched the video a second time, and then intrigued, I found myself looking up and listening to the original version as a point of reference. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what happened next would forever suck me into the world of Hamilton.

My sons Ryan (left) and Carson (right) with Miguel Cervantes Who played Alexander Hamilton in the Chicago company‘s production of Hamilton.

First, I located a recording of the opening number from the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton. Not surprisingly (at least not to anyone who has seen the musical and/or has listened to the soundtrack) I was completely blown away. Next, because the selection I had listened to was part of a series of videos that had been uploaded onto YouTube, the suggested search results automatically started playing the next video in the sequence, which represented the second track on the original Broadway cast recording. Video after video, track after track I continued. After a couple of hours my family was finally up and starting to mill around, but by this point I was hooked, and there was no way I was going to stop until I had listened to the soundtrack in its entirety. So, I continued doing a series of chores around the property, the whole while listening to Hamilton’s captivating story through my iPhone’s earbuds.

When I had finally finished, I first remember having this realization that I had just been introduced to one of the most amazing and beautiful pieces of art. It was, and is still, that good. My second thought was that I wanted to listen to it again, which I of course did. After my second time through the original Broadway cast recording it was early afternoon and I could barely contain my excitement as I decided to share my new discovery with my wife. Her initial reaction was that she didn’t want to listen to it, that she would prefer to wait until after we had seen the musical as she didn’t want it to ruin the experience for her. But after a few short days I had my oldest son Carson listening to the YouTube videos with me, and by that following weekend our entire family was listening to the Hamilton CD that we had checked out from the library during our 2 hour drive up to Houghton Lake. At the time we pulled into our cabin, we had just started listening to act 2 of the musical, so when my wife left to run out to grab some groceries from Walmart, she continued listening to where we had left off. She returned a half hour later and was sobbing uncontrollably, as she had gotten to the part in the musical where Hamilton’s son Phillip tragically gets killed in a duel. Of course that was just foreshadowing for what was to come, as she balled through most of the rest of the CD, right up until the very end, when (spoiler alert) Hamilton’s life is cut short after getting shot by his friend and rival Aaron Burr.

My sons Carson (left) and Ryan (right) with Tamar Greene Who played George Washington in the Chicago company’s production of Hamilton.

Over and over again we would listen to the soundtrack, and without fail, it would elicit the same emotional reaction, heightened by this sense of awe and wonderment that it seemed to be getting better and better each time we would listen to it. Our family quickly became Hamilton fanatics, obsessed with soaking up all the information about Hamilton that we could find. We bought our own copy of the Hamilton original Broadway cast recording and listened to the CD non-stop. We checked out an audio book version of the Ron Chernow biography about Alexander Hamilton that had been the inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, then followed it up by reading Chernow’s voluminous biography about George Washington, just so we could learn even more of his back story. We watched countless YouTube videos of late-night talk show interviews with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and bought a copy of the book he co-authored, “Hamilton: The Revolution” which offered additional  insights into the real events in Hamilton’s life that made his story, and the musical that shares his name,  astonishing on so many different  levels. We bought Hamilton socks, t-shirts, and coffee mugs. It was around  this time that we also started making plans to take the train to Chicago for the kids’ 2018 fall break to see the Chicago company perform Hamilton at the CBIC theater, something that we would repeat in August 2019 when we traveled back to the windy city to experience “Hamilton: The Exhibition”.

Our guinea pigs, Ham (on the left) and Burr (on the right).

In 2017 my son Ryan asked for guinea pigs on his Christmas list. My wife and I went back and forth about whether the boys were ready for the responsibility of caring for guinea pigs, but we ultimately decided that they were, and we found someone on Craig’s list that was looking to find a new home for two 6-month old male guinea pigs. When the boys came downstairs on Christmas morning they found the cage with the two guinea pigs in it, along with a note that my wife had printed in a script font to resemble calligraphy. The note read, “We have the honor to be your obedient servants” and was signed “A. Ham” and A. Burr”, which was of course in homage to the song in the musical. And so it was that these two guinea pigs would first start to take on the personas of their namesakes, “Hamilton” (or “Ham” as he would be known), a boisterous pig with long, flowing white hair accented by several rust colored spots, and “Burr”, the more introverted of the two pigs, who himself sported course black hair with thin white circles around his eyes.

Friends and occasional antagonists, we quickly became accustom to Ham and Burr’s distinct personalities. Neither were bashful whenever food was involved, they would immediately come running out of their plastic “pigloos” anytime we tempted them with a carrot or similar treat. But it was Ham that generally seemed more outgoing and comfortable with his new surroundings, while Burr appeared to be more skittish and bashful. Both pigs would do their fair share of squeaking, but Ham would do a particularly loud, excitable squeak when you would first come downstairs each morning, that was as if he was convinced you could understand what he was saying. Ham was also fearless, whether it was one of his many confrontations with Burr, or the first time he came face-to-face with the cat, or later with our Neapolitan mastiff Zanna, he always acted as if he were the highest predator on the food chain.

When we first got the guinea pigs we kept their cage down in our living room which has hardwood floors. At some point we rolled out an old carpet runner and placed it adjacent to their cage so that we could occasionally let them out to run around. We soon realized that they wouldn’t leave the carpet because they didn’t like the feel of their nails on the hardwood floors. At first, we would leave them out while we would run upstairs for a minute. And then, it would be for an entire afternoon while we watched TV in the other room. Eventually it got to the point where we were leaving them out all the time, even when we would go up to our cabin at Houghton Lake for several days, we would always return home to find them still sitting there, content and as happy as ever hanging out on their carpet. We started jokingly telling people that we had “free range” guinea pigs, because we would leave them out all of the time.

That first winter some guy over in the College Heights neighborhood was throwing out one of those book shelf/chest of drawers for a wooden bunk bed. After conning Teresa’s brother into hauling  it back to our house for us, we lined the shelves with contact paper which we then covered with towels and pieces of fleece which had been cut to size. We added removable plexiglass panels to the open sides and cut rectangular openings into the shelves and built a series of ramps to transform it into a four-story guinea pig condominium. After a while, the pigs quit going up onto any of the upper floors, and would just hide out on the ground floor and shit, and because it was such a pain in the ass to clean, we eventually decided to sell the condo to someone on Craig’s list. However, we didn’t stop spoiling Ham and Burr.

We replaced the carpet runner with a 3’x5’ plastic tray from our old dog’s kennel which we lined with a towel and fleece blanket. Not only did Ham and Burr love this, but our cat Stormy did as well, and would lay down in the middle of the fleece with them, harmlessly batting at the pigs when they would get too close for her liking. This past April when our friends asked us to take their 1-year old Neapolitan mastiff puppy, we decided not to chance it, and made some modifications to the pigs habitat. We put together Murphy’s old kennel and placed it next to the guinea pigs smaller cage so that its door aligned with the opening of the larger kennel, in an effort to keep the pigs safe from the dog. Besides one close call shortly after we got her, when Zanna had wedged herself in between the cages and actually got into the kennel and was just turning around to stick her head into where the guinea pigs were sitting, we never really had a problem with Zanna. Of course you can never be one hundred percent certain, but I’m pretty sure Zanna would never intentionally hurt the pigs, it’s just that she’s a 125 pound mastiff so it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where she would be thinking that she was playing with them, but accidently crush them in her massive jaws. Needless to say, the kennel has remained in place—although Zanna will regularly stick her nose up close to the cage to watch the pigs, and for their part, the pigs (mostly Ham) would usually come right up to sniff her.

And this was life as we know it, a blur of kids, animals, and activities, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

The world turned upside down… 

When I got home from deer camp this past Sunday afternoon our house was its usual level of chaos. As Teresa’s cousin Scott and her uncle Rick pulled up in front of our house to drop me off, Zanna was outside barking at us from the backyard. Teresa had text me earlier saying that her and Carson were headed back up to the high school, and that she was going to leave Ryan at home. Carson had been helping out with crew for the high school musical the past two weekends, and now that their run of six performances was over, everybody was going up to the school to help break down the set. I found Ryan inside, along with a spastic Zanna (who had since been let in through the back slider). I’m pretty sure there were chirps coming from over where the guinea pigs cage is, but with everything else that was going on, I honestly can’t say for certain. I soon made my way upstairs, pet the cat for a few minutes (who was hiding in our bedroom), and then went into our bathroom to take a shower and shave. I came back downstairs about 45 minutes later, fluffed the clothes in the dryer, and cleaned up around the kitchen. A few minutes later Teresa called me and said that they hadn’t had dinner yet, and asked me to order pizza. A half hour later, after a hectic, exhausting weekend, our family finally sat down together at the kitchen table to eat.

When we finished eating around 8pm, Teresa asked the boys to check on the guinea pigs and make sure that they had plenty of water, pellets, and hay. That’s when they noticed him. At first it looked like he was just laying out in the open, sleeping on the fleece blanket, but then the boys quickly realized that something wasn’t right. In all of the commotion that ensued, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, until I heard Teresa say, “its Ham” and then as she pushed away the cage to get a closer look, she confirmed our worst fears. 

Ham, like his namesake from the musical and the historical figure on which the story is based, was suddenly gone, his life abruptly cut short, and for no apparent reason. We were never able to determine why he died (and no, I know what some of you are probably thinking--Burr wasn’t to blame this time). There wasn’t any obvious cause of death, it was just that one minute he was there and then he wasn’t.

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story…

In the moments and days that followed, all of us reacted differently to Ham’s passing. Of course we all cried, that much we had in common. Ryan had an extremely difficult time accepting that Ham was actually gone, but after he settled down a little bit, he wanted to hold Ham on his lap one last time so he could say his final goodbyes. Carson held Burr for a while, but then felt he needed to do something to take his mind off of everything, and wanted to build and paint a box to bury Ham in. Mostly because she was helping the boys to cope with everything, Teresa felt the need to talk, which I think actually helped her too. And as for me, I really felt the need to write.

In the musical its Hamilton’s wife Eliza who tells his story, and asks the question “if you had more time”. I guess the fact that I am sitting here writing this, makes me that person for Ham.

I know it’s silly, but I get at least a little solace by recognizing the irony that Ham was named for Alexander Hamilton, and despite the cosmic injustice of it all, that of the two pigs his was the life that was cut short. I think it helps me to think that Ham had some bigger role to play, another stage that he was meant to shine on. I know he was just a guinea pig, but to me and my family Ham was bigger than life, and like his namesake, the mark he left on our lives will endure long past the short time he was with us.

When we were up north this past weekend, some of us guys had actually been standing around the bonfire talking about how much it hurts to lose a pet. At one point I had turned to Teresa’s uncle Mike to say how I believed it is much harder when you enter kids into the equation. Of course we couldn’t have foreseen what was about to happen, but Mike just said how he thought it was cool that we know that it is hard, but that we still choose for our kids to have that experience. He went on to explain how it is important for kids to go through the experience of having to lose a pet, and summed it up by referencing the old adage, it’s better to have loved and loss, than never to have loved at all.

We certainly did love Ham, and I am convinced that he knew this, and that he felt loved. As much as it hurts right now to experience his loss, I’m comforted in knowing he had a good life--with all sorts of carrots, large roomy spaces to range around in and four-story, deluxe condominiums to explore, and yes, even a best friend name Burr to share his life with. 

Just like I can’t come across a ten-dollar bill without thinking of the Hamilton depicted in the musical, I know I’ll never be able to listen to the soundtrack again without thinking of our Ham. And like art imitating life, and life imitating art, it’s as if a little piece of you is gone, but still always there—only now it’s in the form of a memory, and something that you can no longer live, and just experience in the moment. That’s the essence of Hamilton, and of our personal connection to the small furry critter who shared his name.