Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Of Mice As Men
I got to work last Monday morning after a day off for Rosh Hashona and found my boss and the secretary gathered in my cube - an inauspicious start to the the New Year if ever I’ve seen one. They were checking out the cheese: a hard little yellow wedge they’d found on my carpet. It had been dropped by a wee mousie who’s been haunting our floor and who’d dashed past them with the prize in his mouth. He escaped, but at the cost of his lovely hunk of dairy goodness. Over the course of subsequent days we had a lot of sightings of little Pedro, as he’d been dubbed - scampering across corridors, poking out from under shelving units… And, as I was at the time inclined to overthink such things, I tried to learn something from our mouse that might be consonant with my new year’s reconciling.
First, building management has been swearing it’s one mouse, we are all seeing the same little varmit, it’s not an infestation - it’s just a solo sojourn, a lonely visitation soon to be concluded. But that one little mouse is 2” and 4” in length; he’s grey and black and brown; timid and brazen. Just as I tend to focus on one thing I’d like to change about myself, one failing to be remedied or one strength to develop further, but in fact my myriad frailties require soulful repair in myriad ways beyond the one error that first catches my attention, similarly, the mouse we see should remind us of the many mice we don’t. The single mouse does not exist. Message to building management: your mouse problem goes deeper than you think. All our problems do. The less of them we see, the deeper they are likely to go.
The building manager should know this even though her professional training consists solely of a Masters in Jewish Studies. She’s a loud, heavy, pushy woman who uses the speaker phone all the time at top volume with her door open. She’s blamed a friend of mine, our sweet and thoughtful librarian, for letting “the” mouse into the building in a box brought in from off-site storage. When my friend tried to defend herself, or at least verify the gravamen of the accusation, the building manager backed off, claiming that the box had been lost, or destroyed, and anyway she didn’t know which box it had been or what had been in it. She had blame to spare, but nothing to back it up. Here’s a suggestion for the building manager: you’ve got a problem (or problems) running around your building. Work on solving it (them). Clean up the mess that is now your responsibility. Your efforts to shift blame and accuse others are no credit to you, and distract us all from the issue at hand. I won’t tell you how to catch a mouse, but I will tell you that accusing others of creating the problem won’t solve it. And frankly, mice happen. Deal with it.
But the mouse - or mice - itself: I couldn’t help but feel a share of kinship with it. He was hungry and scared, surrounded by giants, imperiled by traps and poisions at every turn. The mouse knew no malice, sought only to survive and propagate. Sure, he pooped on our desks - but not out of vindictiveness, merely in accord with natural law. Mouse eats; mouse poops. It wasn’t meant to mean anything more. When I saw him scurry in the broad daylight from carrel to carrel I could only think how frightened he must have been to expose himself to such monsters as we are, screaming and stomping and throwing things at him. No one was bit or attacked - the closest was when the cute data entry clerk had him pingponging around behind the CPU under her desk. And sure, she was shocked and she squealed - but the mouse was literally bouncing off the walls, tiny and frail and desparate for peace. As are we all. It’s tempting to draw the “vermin as sin” analogy and be done with it, but it seems more meaningful to me to think in terms of mice as men. I felt sorry for the little fella. Compassion, after all, is my special gift.
I picked this essay to post today out of my writings over the past week, because yesterday one of the staff in finance mentioned to me, without rancor, that a mouse had been found dead in a poison glue trap. The details of his demise were too gruesome for me to recount, but suffice to say, I am deeply torn over what has happened to that fuzzy little pest. He clearly knew absolute terror in his final hours, and showed great courage in his effort to overcome his predicament. But now we’re down one mouse, and maybe up one more human frailty that we need to address.
And I mentioned “compassion” as my special gift: I know this because I drew the card. My congregation draws cards on Rosh Hashona morning from two baskets at the doors to the meetinghall, business cards turned face down, one basket of blue cards and one of buff, each inscribed with a personal quality. One card represents your special gift - that which will guide you through dark times, that you can rely on when all else seems equivocal and unsure. The other card is your challenge - the thing you want to inculcate in yourself, that, if nurtured and fostered, will help you blossom as a person. Which is which, is up to you to decide. Last year I chose persistence (my gift) and balance (my challenge, still). This year I chose joy and compassion. I have compassion out the wazoo; I cry at hallmark commercials. I still seek true joy, the happiness that looks not past itself for justification and completeness. That little mouse - I feel for him. And what I feel is not joy.
