A Public Confession: Mea Maxima Culpa

Mortimer the Mouse is dead. I killed him.

After a week of trying to bait two different Havahart traps that allow a homeowner or office denizen to catch a so-called pest and return him live to the Wild, Mortimer kept taunting me with each of my visitors, last night. He would come out of wherever he was making noise and run about and scamper back into hiding. He was feasting on peanut butter and crackers each time he would successfully foil the Havahart trap.

I could say that it was "Death by Cop" as they call it in the TV shoot-em-ups. But truth be told, Mortimer and his kin were doing what they had been doing forever ... finding shelter from the Winter's cold and I was doing what Colonialists have done, forever: claiming this home and office as my own and killing anyone who got in my way.

I don't know much about Morty (who may have been a Magdalene). I don't know if he was a Father ... of course, he was some Mouse's child. Actually, as I said yesterday, he might've been a vole. But it was me who went out to the hardware store where they sell chemical weapons and brought Mort to his end. RIP, Good Buddy!

Alas. I have met and known too many people who are unwilling to accept what my youngest child's Nursery School teacher told her many years ago: "when you walk or drive, you're often stepping on bugs and killing them ... know that! ... think about that." Edith Post was a very smart old lady. I'm not speaking about original sin but the ongoing everyday sins of living. The folk I've known may be divided (perhaps, this is too simple) into two categories. First and not so uncommon are those who cannot imagine doing harm to others, though they do see when others harm them. Second is a group who may even think about causing pain to others. In my work with kids and their parents, I have found that the "innocent" group ... those who simply cannot imagine hurting or wanting to hurt their kids, do indeed hurt or even abuse them. Then there are those who betimes have fantasies or images of hanging their kids by their toes and whacking them with the core of a roll of paper toweling or worse; they tend to not abuse their kids.

Ah! The non-thought is Father to the deed, as one of my visitors claimed was the most important thing he learned from me. (Or that I learned from him!)

Sorry Mortimer! If we meet in some better place at some better time at "the Inn at the end of the road*", I owe you one! Maybe I'll tell you about a relative of yours in the Winter of 1973 ... We called him Harvey Wallbanger and worked out a way to save him .... many times.


*  (I think Alexander Woolcott's or GK Chesterton's eulogy for the other or for Dickens ... can't recall)