No Illusions of Immortality

If you don't know who Mr. Jingles is, he was our mouse. Not really ours...but he had been breaking into our kitchen for two years to hang out and drive me crazy. After a year of not being able to catch him or poison him, I realized he was not your ordinary mouse. He was more of a circus mouse, really. I know this because he was very athletic and capable of performing entertaining tricks. For instance, he always came into the kitchen from behind the stove, so one night I tried lining up multiple traps, thinking he would have no alternative but to be snared, since he couldn't go around them. Well, ha ha ha. Little did I know he could simply heave his little body onto the wire of the espresso machine and swing over the traps to get to his target ( the sink, which I keep spotless by the way, and will never know why he loved it so). Yes, Mr. Jingles was a skilled trapeze artist. Aptly, he had to be named Mr. Jingles, after the beloved circus-bound mouse in one of my favorite films: The Green Mile.

Mr. Jingles cleverly avoided all types of traps and poisonous baits. In fact, he never ate anything in our kitchen; there were no crumbs, and all food containers in our kitchen are plastic. He never touched or chewed any papers, or made any such typical mouse-like disturbances. He basically just climbed onto the counter from a hole too small for us to see, and just hung out by the espresso machine or the sink. Maybe he was waiting to be offered a cafe au lait, or needed to wash something. Hard to say. But he drove me mad, that Mr. Jingles. Sometimes he would stay gone for weeks, months even. But I always knew he would be back. He would first visit me in a dream, popping out from behind a white dream cloud. Startled, I would wake up sweating, heart pounding. I would say to my husband, "he's back. Mr. jingles is back!" And a few days later, one of us would walk into the kitchen and there he'd be, pompously sitting on the stove with a smug grin. (okay, that was a dramatization.) But still, my dreams were prophetic, and if a mouse were capable of a smug grin, Mr. Jingles would have been donning a broad one.

I tried to creep up on him. I would go into the living room and wait for the telltale faint pitter patter of his little paws, like the heartbeat under the floorboards in the Edgar Allen Poe story. After an eternity, I slowly, cat-like, placed one foot into the kitchen. His ears, eyes, and nose surfaced above the back of the counter. Our eyes met, and we were both simultaneously paralyzed by fear. In unison, we screamed and retreated from whence we came. I to the living room, and Mr. Jingles to his mouse home in the wall. ( Again, the scream here on the part of Mr. Jingles is more of a dramatization than an accurate portrayal, but I felt that it better highlighted the mood.) From then on, I avoided Mr. Jingles. When he left to go on sabbaticals, I slept well. When he returned, it was torture. Finally, after nineteen months, my husband located and sealed off his point of entry behind the stove.

This brings me to the story of his death, which I hate to tell because it's rather anticlimactic, and I don't want to emasculate his name by letting the world know he died in such an ordinary fashion. But then, I think Mr. Jingles would have wanted me to be honest. So I'll just lay it out for you. One evening, our landlord invited us to dinner. We ate sushi at our favorite place. And because the nature of this blog compels me to do so, I have to tell you I was drinking a bottle of Cotes du Ventoux. It was slightly off, actually. Faintly oxidized. Anyway, our landlord casually told us that Mr. Jingles came downstairs to his part of the house, since he'd been locked out of ours....and met his fate with a spring trap. I was stunned. What bait had he used? We had tried everything from peanut butter to bacon. We were told it was a small lump of organic peanut butter, with a single piece of Roquefort cheese on top. Roquefort. I had only tried Gruyere and French Feta, thinking we might have similar tastes. I felt like an idiot. Still, it was hard to believe. He never would have fallen for a simple spring trap. I started to think that maybe it was a different mouse. I asked for his exact size, and if he had brownish grey hair with a small cream colored marking on his belly. It matched up. Mr. Jingles was dead. He had finally walked that long green mile.

And so it is. Our kitchen is no longer a stage for trapeze acts and mouse-sized shots of espresso. I sleep through the night and don't listen for his scratching. When I go to the kitchen, I don't hesitate by the door in fear of him being in there, waiting to pounce me. I just walk right in. There is no need to bleach the counter tops everyday. Everything is back to normal. I almost...sort of....miss Mr. Jingles. He wasn't that different from you or me, and I imagine we will meet again; I have no illusions of immortality. One day, we will all have to walk the Green Mile.