The Christmas Mouse

My wife is afraid of mice...irrationally and deathly afraid of mice. I blame her father. So does she. Lisa’s dad was a jokester. As she tells it, one day on the farm her mom discovered a mouse in the house. This is not an unusual occurrence, by the way. Mice love farms for obvious reasons. Plenty of places to hide: lots to nibble on; cats to torment. Knowing his youngest daughter was afraid of these pesky creatures, her dad pretended he had caught it and proceeded to chase her around the yard with his hand behind his back as if he was holding the varmint. It traumatized her for life.

After we got married, I learned very quickly not to even talk about mice in our house. If there was any evidence at all of a mouse in or near our house or garage, I would quietly attend to the matter on my own. When I caught the offending critter, I would dispose of it quickly and humanely. And by humanely, I mean I would toss it in the garbage can wrapped in a brown paper bag. After it had been crushed in a mouse trap laced with some Jif crunchy peanut butter, of course. Personally, I was always of the opinion that, "Hey, mice have to live somewhere!" Needless to say, I kept that opinion to myself.

One night, Lisa was hosting a business event at our home in Madison. I was sitting in the upstairs hallway using my computer to project a video on the wall of the great room. All of a sudden I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head slightly to the right and saw a mouse slinking along the baseboard behind me, slowly, almost arrogantly. It was as if the mouse was thinking, "Yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it?" I caught the eye of Lisa’s assistant, Rita, and mouthed the word ‘MOUSE’ while pointing to the floor behind me. Quite aware of Lisa’s phobia, she got the message. She quietly excused herself from the gathering and came upstairs. By this time, the interloper had disappeared into our daughter’s bedroom. I whispered, “We have to make sure it doesn’t get downstairs. Lisa will freak out!” 

After the event, Rita lingered for a bit. Lisa noticed us whispering and gesturing toward the upstairs. Her spidey senses must have been on full alert because she said, “What’s going on, you guys? Is there a mouse? Is there a mouse?”

Never one to prevaricate, Rita said, “Well, Dan said he may have seen a mouse upstairs during the event.”

Cue Ralphie’s mom talking to Schwartz’s mom after Ralphie dropped the F-bomb in A Christmas Story...”Whaaaaaat? Whaaaaaat?”

She made a beeline for the garage and locked herself in her pink Cadillac. “I’m not coming back in the house until you catch that thing!” she yelled through the window.

In the end, Rita and I managed to chase that mouse downstairs, and after a long, hairbrained run-around, I captured it in a bucket near the Christmas tree, took it out back and gave it what for.

All this brings me to the point of my story. A couple days ago, Lisa’s best friend called. I was in the next room and overheard parts of the conversation.

Her friend Nancy said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I think I have a mouse living in my car!”

“Whaaaaaaaat?” Lisa yelled. “You have a mouse living in your car?”

“Yes!” Nancy said. “I drove to an event the other night. I had some cookies in a plastic bag on the front seat. When I got back to my car, the bag had been chewed open and half the cookies had been eaten!”

“When I got home, I told Kevin about it so he put four traps on the floor of the car. The next morning I went to Starbucks. The mouse had eaten the peanut butter out of all four traps and they were still set! Kevin said, ‘Clearly, we’re dealing with a very wily mouse’.”

“I would die!” Lisa said. “Literally die! So you think the mouse is still in there?”

“Yes!” Nancy said. “I’ve been driving around for at least a week with a mouse in my car! Kevin then put four humane box traps in the car. The mouse came and went for another day like they were his private condos! And he shredded my Starbucks napkin in the glove box. It looked like confetti in there!”

Lisa said, “I would never get in that car again. I would return it to the dealership.” (And she wasn’t joking.)

I called Nancy this morning to wish them Merry Christmas.

“You still have a mouse in your car?” I asked.

She laughed and said, “I think it’s gone! I put a bag of cookies on the front seat last night and they were untouched this morning.”

I heard Kevin chime in from the other room. “I'm pretty sure the mouse got scared as Nancy drove 85 m.p.h. down I-94! I think he jumped out the window. It’s a Christmas miracle!”

Merry Christmas from our mouse to yours!