Phthursday Musings: Forever Felix

Felix passed away quietly some time early Tuesday. He had stopped eating about a week and a half earlier. He had been a healthy hamster and then suddenly he wasn’t. They are, unfortunately, very fragile little creatures.

He was probably born around Halloween in 2023, and came home in February 2024. He took to his new home immediately.

He wasn’t quite a ghost hamster, but he did tend to keep to himself, to the point where it wasn’t uncommon for 4-5 days to go by without us seeing him. When we did get him out his first instinct was to find some kind of safety.

Felix definitely liked a good flax. His favorite food though was red sorghum.

As much as he liked the sorghum, he never exactly overdid it. He weighed barely more than 5 ounces!

Felix wasn’t much of an escape artist and didn’t tend to trash his enclosure. He was a bit of a hoarder, though, and would sometimes take pouching to an extreme, as he did here with a dandelion root:

There’s a lot of terrible stuff going down impacting a lot of people and I think in such times many of us try to stifle our emotions, or at least, that’s what I do.

I mention that because I think, this week, I’ve had difficulty letting myself just be sad. I literally stop and tell myself sometimes I’m not going to let those bastards get me down, and maybe I also need to tell myself that I’m not going to let those bastards keep me from being down.

Alright, enough talk of those bastards. Let’s have a little mirth in remembrance of Felix.

Felix is an old name. It comes directly from Latin, where it means happy or lucky. If you’d never thought of it like that, consider that the Spanish feliz means happy - as in feliz navidad, which everyone knows thanks to José Feliciano… whose name is also a derivative from the Latin! The feminine forms would be Felice, Felicia, or Felicity.

There were five popes named Felix, except two of them were actually antipopes.

If you know about any Supreme Court justice from between 1850 and 1950, there’s a good chance it’s Felix Frankfurter, because his mother named him Felix Frankfurter, and I defy you to forget that name now.

Growing up, the two most famous Felixes were these guys:

But of course neither of them were Felixes of my time. Felix the Cat actually dates to 1919, and Felix Ungar from The Odd Couple was from the 60s and 70s. I don’t think I’ve ever met a human named Felix - though admittedly it’s a more common name in several European countries.

In my time, the most famous Felix was Félix Hernández, aka King Felix:

All of these informed my idea of giving a hamster a name of Felix, and I liked it. I mean, I didn’t actually know about the popes, or the antipopes, but that’s okay. There are so many popes and antipopes to not know about, and I’m very glad we didn’t name him Eulalius.

Now, I’m not one to start a new feature and then abandon it the following week. Instead I’ll figure some way to weave it in. Here then is your Phthursday Flag:

This is, of course, the flag for Felix, Spain, a hamlet of a few hundred people in southern Andalusia just a bit off the Mediterranean coast. (You’d actually pronounce it fay-LEESS, same as feliz.) It’s part of the province of Almería and just a few kilometers from the city of the same name, so I imagine the good people of Felix to be fans of UD Almería, a team currently in Spain’s Segunda División.

The official website for Felix makes it look like a lovely little place, and also shares this photo with the label “Maquinaria del Reloj de la Torre” which translates to “machinery of the clock of the tower”, which tells you how small this place is. Not only is the clock tower a main destination, it’s such a main destination that the innards are also a main destination!

At first this looked to me less like a clock than like some sort of magnificent sea serpent crossed with a Dalí painting, but perhaps you see something else in it.

Andalusia is where I most want to visit in Spain, incidentally, and I’d be happy to wind up in Almería only to wander into Felix and see el reloj de la torre and even la maquinaria within.

As for the flag itself, I would guess that the brown and green reflect the mountains and grass, but that’s only a guess. The colors are borrowed from the shield / coat of arms, which is itself interesting, with imagery of the crown, the cross, and the crescent. That’s a lot to pack into a shield for a town of about 500 people!

Perhaps the most famous Felix of the last 500 years was the German composer Felix Mendelssohn. Whether you realized it or not, one of the tunes you most readily recognize is Mendelssohn’s:

A slightly less well known Felix would be Felix Pappalardi, bassist / pianist / backing vocalist / producer extraordinaire, whose best known co-credit was with his band Mountain… if you know what I mean:

Pappalardi is on bass here and of course that’s Leslie West on guitar and lead vocals. This makes me wonder… I had a copy of Mountain’s Climbing on vinyl at one point, whatever happened to that…

I actually had an entirely separate piece ready to go today, except it wasn’t quite ready to go, and then I thought it was doubly long, and… well, I’m letting you all into a little secret that sometimes Phthursday Musings get started earlier on, but sometimes - as is the case here - it all gets written in a single evening, reviewed, and published.

Several of the pieces you’ve read, then, were being wrapped up about the time a certain rustling was beginning. Felix would often emerge and take food down into his burrow earlier on, but he mostly preferred that the lights not still be on and humans not still be about when it was time to come out and run. As a result I don’t think we ever really got a good video of him on his wheel!

He was a good little guy. He preferred hiding to cuddling, but hey, that describes a lot of humans I’ve known too.

RIP Felix, thank you for the happiness you brought us.