An unforgettable childhood experience

Unforgettable Childhood Experience

DOG IS "GOD" SPELLED BACKWARDS and "PEST" IS ONLY ONE LETTER AWAY FROM PET

When I was in seventh grade, I bought a pet mouse from a local pet store and quite unoriginally, named him "Mickey." Many people think of mice the same way they think of cockroaches, but the tame ones bred for sale in pet stores are actually quite trainable, cute, and very devoted as parents. They vary, of course, in their intelligence and temperament, but if you happen to get a relatively bright one, they make surprisingly fun little pets - perfect for kids like me who liked animals but couldn't have a dog or a cat of their own.

A witnessed a perfect example of how unfair a reputation mice have my school science fair, when I setup my little exhibit consisting of my entire network of a plastic Habitrail ™ cages from home. It was a futuristic-looking little plastic city with transparent yellow tubes connecting clear plastic cages with exercise wheels, ladders, and little penthouses sitting atop vertical tubes in which the mice could scramble up and down.

A secretary from the principal's office was playing with one of Harry's mice, letting it climb through her cupped hands, even holding it right up to her face to tell him how cute he was. It hadn't even occurred to us that she might not know it was a mouse, but then she asked whether he was a gerbil or a hamster. The instant I told her that the animal in her hand was a mouse she screamed, dropped Mickey to the floor and shuddered from the realization that she almost kissed a mouse.

Mickey learned very quickly to come to my hand and climb on to it as soon as I opened his cage. He would come flying up the tube leading to the highest penthouse as soon as he saw me approach and hop right out when I opened up the top. When I put him down on the floor he would just walk his way around, exploring the room, usually climbing back into my open hand as soon as I presented it to him. When I gave him one hand after the other, he would run endlessly as though I were his human exercise wheel. Other times he would just grab onto my pants leg and scurry all the way up my body because he had learned that I kept nuts and some other treats for him in my shirt pocket.

He would take paper and cloth from my hand to shred into insulation for the plastic penthouse he had established as his sleeping quarters. When his bedding looked like it was getting too flat, I used to offer him little pieces of brown paper, or cotton, or tissue paper, and he would select whichever one he wanted. He seemed happiest with it when there was so much material stuffed in there that he slept completely covered on all sides as well as on top of him.

Contrary to what one might expect from exposure to Saturday morning cartoons, cheese was not really very high up on the list of his favorite foods. He loved most nuts, anything sweet, especially if it was crunchy, and milk, which I gave him in a little saucer. He learned to let me hold certain foods for him, like sunflower seeds, which he could crack open bit more easily from between my fingers than if he held it himself. Otherwise, he would just sit comfortably in my hand, holding whatever he was eating between his front paws, periodically rotating it for the best biting angle.

In addition to the original Habitrail ™ setup, I also built Mickey a more secluded dungeon-like underground "basement," gluing my old, children's building blocks together to make the walls. I kept making the walls higher by adding more and more blocks, and eventually its volume exceeded that of the original plastic cage city on top of it. One of the plastic tubes led directly from the main cage down into the dungeon through a hole I drilled in the wooden roof. Mickey really seemed to appreciate it, spending most of his time there.

Unless I tapped on the roof to let him know I was there, he hardly came up at all.

That summer my Dad thoughtfully surprised me at sleep-away camp by showing up on visiting day with Mickey in the main section of his cage city in the back seat of his Volvo, which I appreciated tremendously. He seemed to enjoy running around on the baseball field, but my Dad was nervous the whole time we had Mickey out of the car. He knew that both of us would be out there all night with the Volvo's headlights on if he happened to get away from me.

When Mickey was about a year and a half-old, he started getting raw, open sores on his back and behind his head. The more he scratched them the worse they got, so my Dad eventually drove us to a local veterinarian. The vet laughed when he read the chart and saw that the patient was a mouse named "Mickey." He started putting on gloves so I told him that Mickey didn't bite, to which he responded that virtually every animal that ever bit him "didn't bite." He gave me a tube of some medicated ointment to put on Mickey's sores for a while, which I did, but he would scratch most of it off almost as soon as I got it on him.