Mice in the Garage

We've had occasional "visitors" in the house over the years, so it's really no big deal that Liam saw a mouse in the garage recently. It has been cold, so I can understand the invasion. Despite understanding, however, I wasn't feeling particularly mouse-itarian, so I set several of those snap traps in strategic locations. Sure enough, they did the business. What was disturbing, however, was just how non mouse-iterian the mice themselves were. I've heard that mice tend to travel in breeding pairs, so I fully expected to have more than one of the traps see business. I've also chuckled at the expression, the early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese . . . Hence my multiple trap approach. Hey, I'm a pragmatist along the lines of Richard Adams who said he would have no compunction about killing a rabbit even after writing Watership Down. It's only a rabbit.  And talking of rabbits, I'm also reminded of Philip Larkin's "Myxomatosis":


Caught in the centre of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
                          I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick.  I'm glad I can't explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If only you could keep quite still and wait.


Anyway, I wasn't about to lose sleep over a couple of mice snapped out. But the axiom proved to be more than accurate, as I discovered this afternoon. Not only had the second mouse secured the cheese, or in this case, the peanut butter, but it had also devoured a little of the hapless first mouse. Its sad, beady little eyes looked up at me with all the expressive questioning of Miss Brill's fur, "what has become of me?" but adding, "my neck's snapped in this awful contraption, and my side's gnawed to the bone." Now don't forget, I've heard they travel in breeding pairs, so I was disturbed, and I use that word advisedly, to think that with mouse #1's contribution to the gene pool clearly ended, it became something different to mouse #2 even before it was cold! Now I haven't begun to consider the gender of this hapless pair (hapless PAIR since the second mouse succumbed to a second trap a matter of minutes after I removed its mate), but I wonder. OK, so I have considered it; I just haven't typed it.

The Sense of an Ending

As an English teacher, I really expect myself to read a little more than I actually do. Busy life and papers to grade are my two standard excuses, but I hear my colleagues talking of their latest literary conquests, and I cringe in professional inadequacy. They are just as busy as I, yet they manage to eke out the time. So on this my first full day on Christmas break, I added Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending to my Kindle and devoured it cover to cover today. (Does "cover to cover" work for a Kindle purchase?) I've always had a thing for the Man Booker Prize, so this year's winner seemed to be a logical first choice. The meager 160-odd pages were honestly secondary to the accolades the book has received in my choice of first texts.

Anyway, I loved this book. Themes of nostalgia, misrememberings, and existential angst will always resonate with me, and I'm thinking of including this novel as part of my Philosophy and Literature elective next year. I'll have to revisit it once the afterglow of the experience of reading has subsided -- perhaps, more appropriately, once the venom from the sting in the "tale" has dissipated -- but it seems to be one worth including in that context. I was reminded of Yann Martel's The Life of Pi and my waking Dana asleep beside me at 2AM with "you won't believe how this ends!" I burbled that to myself for a good few days after I'd finished the book. But this plot's oblique edginess and these charcters' extraordinary banality will have The Sense of an Ending stay with me even longer. It's certainly a serendipitous choice for the first novel of my New Literary Age.