Mice

1. I love Of Mice and Men.

2. Why are there so many animated mice in the world and why are they allowed to go on living? We are afraid of them in real life, but turn them into cartoons and they’re considered lovable. Consider: Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Jerry (is his last name Mouse?), the Ratatouille guy (points to anyone who can remember his name without having to look it up), and Mighty Mouse.

3. Just remembered: his name is Remy. Points to me, I guess.

4. When I was a kid, I often wore my hiking boots, er, “clod hoppers” to the bathroom (even if I had nothing else on—now there’s an image for you), because frequently a mouse would appear and I wanted to be prepared to give it a sound stomping.

5. I saw a mouse run across the kitchen floor once. I grabbed the closest thing I could find to defend myself: a meat tenderizer. I prefer to kill mice in as violent a way as possible.

6. My son gets more frightened by things that might happen in movies than by the appearance of the Rodents Of Unusual Size in The Princess Bride. Go figure.

7. The mice in Babe are among my favorite characters in any movie I’ve ever seen, full stop.

8. I love the line “Or rats’ feet over broken glass/ In our dry cellar” in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men.

9. I like cheese, but not the stinky kind.

I find it amusing that humans will keep mice as pets. Yet if they see one run across the kitchen floor they scream hysterically. I offer you some vignettes of my life experience with mice(if you are squeamish, you might want to go elsewhere):

• Once, our family took care of our neighbors’ pet mice. They lived in a glass aquarium. I can’t remember whose decision it was, but we put some wide flat books (and therefore heavy) on the top to keep them in. You see where this is going, don’t you? A book fell in and impaled one of the poor little mice. My mother was mortified and overcome with guilt.

• Sometime later we had our own pet mouse. I remember him being tiny, white and cute. I can’t remember his name.

• When our neighborhood started getting built up and many of the empty lots overtaken by construction equipment, a mouse came inside, deciding our bright orange kitchen was a good place to live. There was a random assortment of people in our kitchen hunting for said mouse. It made the mistake of making a run for it from under the fridge. One of the men involuntarily gave in to his primal urge to stomp on said mouse. He squashed its head flat.

• Shortly after Meg was born, a mice died a sqeaky death on my bag of brown sugar.

• Troy and I had a little mouse for awhile in Barcelona. I don’t know why. His name was Pipsqueak, Pip for short.