A philosophical approach to a mouse in the house

Keep in mind that he's a peaceful underdog and even ... a family man.

By Richard O'Mara | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the May 9, 2008 edition

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Baltimore - It's the little things that annoy us most, someone once said. Right now I am more than annoyed by little things – brownish gray, swift-as-a-blink-of-the-eye things. My wife shivers and shakes, and I feel a bit scattered. We are beset by mice.

We went away for two months. When we returned we met them – here, there, everywhere around us. I laid traps, with some effect.

But more appeared.

We had an exterminator come in (such a word, "exterminator," so Schwarzeneggerish.) He found the tracks they make as they slink through the kitchen; he sprinkled his magic powder in all the nooks and crannies: the population shrank, we could tell.

But still they came on.

I made efforts to keep them at bay, stuffed every hole behind the range and refrigerator with coarse steel wool. After all that, my wife surprised one trying to eat her grapes. It disappeared under the stove.

We bought electronic machines that boasted, unequivocally, that they would drive all pests from our apartment with a mixture of ultra high frequency sounds, disconcerting to the mice. We waited to hear the scurrying and scraping, evidence of their emigration.

Our exterminator laughed, but politely. He sprinkled more powder.

We live in an old building, a place that compensates for its antiquity and sweet disintegration with its architectural splendor. It has holes on the outside of it where the little beasties can enter. Maybe that's why our neighbors in the other apartments are nearly all equipped with cats. I like cats, but mine died.

In fact, I think that cats, when compared with mice in the mind of the great public, do not fare well. People say sympathetic things about mice more readily than they do about cats. The mouse in our culture has become something of an underdog, which is a good thing to be, since all Americans profess to love the underdog, even if it's a mouse. This has been going on for some time. Think of "Mickey Mouse" and "Stuart Little" and "Tom and Jerry," the classic animated cartoon series, as perfect examples of what I'm talking about. Jerry the mouse is cute and clever; Tom, the cat, is stupid, inept, even clumsy. (Whoever heard of a clumsy cat?)

The Scottish poet Robert Burns, it is said, owed his success to a mouse, the subject of one of his most famous poems, titled, naturally, "To a Mouse." The verses describe a touching encounter between the poet and the rodent in the moments right after the poet, who was also a farmer, had run his plough over the mouse's nest, and put her out in "bleak December's winds."

The poem is an apology to the "cow'rin, tim'rous beastie," from Burns, his "earth-born companion,/ An' fellow mortal!" It also contains, a cautionary reminder that disaster cannot always be forestalled, no matter how hard we try:

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