Tough Guy

 

Suddenly a mouse is here
from nowhere.
I am so much bigger,
but startled,
jump up on the couch
and yell for my little,
but fierce, wife.
(Thank you Will S.
for just the right words.)
Her broom saves me.
I return to reading,
but scan the floor
regularly, uneasily,
fearfully.

-Steve Shoemaker, August 2, 2014

Steve’s memory prompts one of my own from years ago at our home in Cincinnati.

My parents were visiting at the time. My mother, like Steve, was lying on the couch reading when she spotted a mouse, her worst nightmare. She leapt up on the couch and screamed. “Ick! There’s a mouse in here!”

For the next 10 minutes the little mouse scampered around the living room, ran up the drape cord on the right side of the double patio door, across the top of the doors, and down the cord on the left side. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Maxine, the slow-witted cat, sat quietly, swiveling her head from right to left, watching with feline detachment while one of the humans got a paper bag and a broom from the kitchen. Whatever fear there was quickly turned to the side-splitting laughter as the oppressed little creature scurried past us and through the broom sweeper’s legs legs to the opposite end of the living-dining room, under the dining room table, back to the other end past the swishing broom until at long last it found its exodus from pharaoh’s persecution through the patio doors which, at long last, the tough guys had the good sense to open.

Over the years I’ve come to believe there is no difference between a man or woman and a mouse. We’re all mice. Somewhere a mouse is laughing at us.

– Gordon