Topo No Mo

(October 11, 2006)

"I'll bring it down to the dumpster."

"Okay. Only...well I feel like we should say a few words. Or sing something."

"I have Mozart's Requiem on CD, we could play that when I come back up."

"OK."

It finally happened; we trapped a mouse. In a mousetrap. Yes, I know that people in apartments all across the city are trapping mice every day as fall settles in and the little critters escape to the indoors. Mouse stories are traded like wampum beads ("We heard one in our stove!") as city-dwellers one-up each other ("Jill found droppings in her Dior pumps!") while some of us regularly lament the lack of a cat.

Joe and I bought the traps last year but couldn't find the heart to set them. So all last winter we lived with the evidence of a mouse. With some precautions (put the bread into the fridge, keep the cereal way up high, sweep up crumbs) we found that the mouse didn't cause too much inconvenience. We saw him run through a few times but he seemed on his way to somewhere else. A few weeks would pass with no sighting, and we'd assume he left for crumb-ier kitchens, then we'd see him run through again.

And he seemed to be getting bigger. And more brazen -- at first he'd only run through in the dark when we were in the next room, but eventually he started to race right out in the full light with people in the room.

Really cute, though. Brown. Teeny little feet, big ears. How could we kill that little guy? It didn't help that I'd named him. Topo Gigio.

At some point we did set a trap out, but when Topo didn't take the bait (um, Trader Joe's organic salt-free peanut butter does not interest city rodents) we weren't terribly sad...we didn't want to kill Topo!

But the reality is, you just can't have mice. It's just a bad idea. They live in garbage, they carry germs. And they'll make more and more mice and it'll be all over after there's more of them than there are of us.

So we got some less-healthy peanut butter, and tonight Joe put some in the trap.

Topo Gigio went for it.

I'll spare you the details. Unless Joe writes about it in his blog let's just all say a silent goodbye to Topo Gigio, the small, the brown, the brazen. His first taste of Jif was his last taste of this mortal coil.