Feeding Baby Mice

In which our Hero’s lunch goes a little earlier than planned

Please excuse my typing, I’m running at 90% of my normal fingular capacity, at least till tomorrow when I can visit a doctor. Then again, you may not notice a change, Gentle Reader.

Lunch was a plate of frozen dumplings, boiled up and served with some veggies and a homebrew hotsauce. As I poured them onto my plate, I turned to my dad sitting at the kitchen table hunched over the ipad and asked him if he wanted any.

And he looked at them, and looked at me, and said, “They look like baby mice, all wrinkled and white.”

And then he told me a story.

You know the house? he asked me, referring to the home he was born in. You remember it has rafters? Which it does, but only the oldest parts of it. Around the house my great-great-grandfather built is the extensions and add-ons that the old house wears like a fancy plaster frock over wood and concrete bones.

Well, one time, I put your aunt C (Eldest of his younger sisters) down to eat, and as I was feeding her, down came a mouse-baby, straight off the rafters, and right onto the plate. And it looked just like that! he laughed, pointing at my lunch.

Poor aunt C, I said. She probably didn’t react well.

She didn’t react at all, she was too small to know what happened.

And suddenly I realize just how much of a boy he was in the time from which this memory came. And this time, I’m smart enough to write it down.