Mousey's Last Break

A few of you might remember the “guest blog” posted here by the family mouse a while back. In it, he said he was ‘busting out of the joint.’ Not long afterwards, I heard frantic cries coming from the family room. I rushed downstairs to find my wife holding a baseball cap under the door to the cage. Mousey had pushed the twist ties of the cage enough so that he could wriggle through the door. But only halfway. He was dangling halfway in, halfway out while Wendy held the cap under him so he wouldn’t fall to the floor.

But that was his last escape attempt. This morning, he lay still in the sleeping quarters of his Habit-trail. Mousey finally had left this world behind.

I guess it speaks to our family’s general indifference that we never officially named him (my youngest son bought him on a whim while at college). I called him “Mousey.” Our boys occasionally called him “Bear.” Wendy, who never warmed to him at all, called him “the rat." We couldn’t even really decide what he was. My wife said he was a long-haired hamster. I still say he was a mouse.

Despite his rodent family history, I still thought that as one of god’s warm-blooded creatures he deserved a good life of sorts, particularly since he had pet status. So I shared my snacks with him occasionally, whether it was a Cheez-it or a peanut butter cracker. I bought him a salt block and sawed a piece of an old pool cue for him to gnaw on. When it was my turn to clean his cage, I would let him run free in the basement, even after he ran up my pant leg once as I bent over on hands and knees putting his cage back together. When it was time to put him back home, he would play hide and seek with me. Once I found him nestled in Wendy’s old wedding dress.

On Thanksgiving, I gave him a peanut butter cracker and a Cheeto. He never ate them. He pushed them to the side instead. That was a clue he wasn’t well. Mousey never saved snacks for later. When it was obvious that he was on his last legs, I e-mailed my sister-in-law in whose borrowed cage he had been living. She responded, “I'm sorry to hear about the mouse, I think. He lived a good life. (Didn't he?)”

I’d like to think so. For a mouse, anyway.