Monday, February 27, 2006

The Green Mile Mouse by Dave Redwine


How strange that a farmhouse cupboard mouse that ordinarily would be considered disgusting vermin could overnight evolve into seeming mousedom sainthood.

This mouse tale began last weekend when Patti and I traveled to Colorado City to visit Margaret Bodine (Patti's mom), and to check on a grass fire that had crossed our farm property near Lake Champion.

Early Saturday morning Margaret was attending to her volunteer duties for the local prison ministry Samaritan House in town, leaving Patti and myself to our own resourses at her country home. After breakfast I went along my way to check on our farm grass fire situation south of town, leaving Patti home alone to entertain Laci (farm dog), and whatever else crossed her mind to make the world a better place to live.

Well, it turns out, while Margaret and I were away, Patricia Gae, with her usual meticulous tendencies, decides to clean out and rearrange her mom's kitchen pantry.

It wasn't long before she discovered frayed corners on the dry foods sacks and little piles of rice and beans on the pantry shelves. Further cleaning revealed the usual telltale signs of the pantry being turned into a nocturnal Mouseville.

Upon my return it became my assigned duty to satisfactorily resolve this unfortunate circumstance. It seemed Margaret had no regular mousetraps...but she did have rat poison. I long ago learned to resist the poison remedy, and to apply it only as a last resort; as the little critters always seemed to find the most inaccessible place to expire, and the resulting lingering olfactory stimulus was worse than the nuisance.

It was then I remembered an engineering feat that someone had thought up (my Texas A&M days I think) to catch an offending mouse. I proceeded to describe to Margaret and Patti how you could take the cardboard tube from a used up roll of toilet paper, place a dab of peanut butter in one end, and then balance the tube on the cupboard shelf ledge. Then place a tall wastebasket under the shelf (it better be tall 'cause those little suckers can jump).

The mouse would go into the tube for the tasty treat, Newton's 1st Law of Motion would take over and presto...mouse, tube and peanut butter would topple into the wastebasket with a distinctive thud.

At this point my "Aggie" degree was brought into question, and both ladies looked at me like the cheese had done slid off my cracker. I assured them it would work, because I had seen it successfully tested.

And anyway, they insisted, even if this crazy ploy did work (which they sincerely doubted), there was the issue of a "live mouse" in the wastebasket; and I was leaving that afternoon to spend the weekend photographing wild turkeys with my good friend Novice Kniffen at Menard, Texas.

My suggestion was to put the farm kitty in the wastebasket...and if that wasn't practical, just apply the kitchen broom handle in the appropiate manner.

After making sure the neighbors would not be coming over for a visit, the girls dutifully arranged my mousetrap setup and then retired into the den to watch a movie.

As fate would have it, The Green Mile (edited for television) was on, and Margaret had not seen the movie. Without the space or inclination to do a movie review, if you haven't seen The Green Mile, you may need to see it to appreciate what happened next at the Bodine farm movie theater.

It seems that a small and unnaturally intelligent mouse named Mr. Jingles had a significant supporting role in the movie (mostly for comic relief, in my opinion), and for the emotionally sensitive (Margaret and Patti included), the anthropopathism effect ( assigning human emotions and feelings to animals) had no boundries for this particular movie star mouse.

Such being the case, the next morning, when a mouse strongly resembling Mr. Jingles was found in the bottom of the wastebasket (I told you it would work), none of my aforementioned suggestions for disposing of said mouse had any credibility whatsoever.

Be that as it may, as Patti was returning home to Andrews that afternoon, with wastebasket and mouse in tow, Mr. Jingles II was released unharmed on FM 208 north of Colorado City...and he scampered straight for a roadside TXU power station...probably carrying with him the script for Tom Hanks and The Green Mile II.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home