Mouse

The mouse was a visible force when I was a kid. Walt Disney had brought them to the foreground with cartoon characters such as Micky and Minnie Mouse – not to mention Micky Mouse’s teenaged cheer squad known as The Mouseketeers! Was it Tom or was it Jerry who was a mouse (the other a cat of unpredictable temperament)? Speedy Gonzales (‘Arribe! Arribe!’) was funny and Mighty Mouse flew through the skies wearing a red cape to ‘save the day’ every Saturday morning. From earlier generations, there were poems and stories with mice (‘Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock…’). The mouse who pulled a thorn from a lion’s paw fascinated us with his Good Samaritan pluck. Some kids – and the occasional beloved adult – would tame a mouse, and carry the pet in his or her pocket. Friends in grad school sometimes kept little pale lab rats for pets to keep them from being exterminated when they were retired from science experiments. As I grew up, mice were no longer as popular and people would bring rodent relatives like gerbils, hamsters, and guinea pigs home for pets. Mice were no longer high on the popularity charts.

One of my favorite poems is by a man from Scotland named Robert Burns. In the late 1700s he wrote 'To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with a Plough'.