An Uninvited Guest

Yesterday morning I was half-asleep when Lenny came into the room stomping around, opening closets, lifting up things, muttering to himself, all of which I found rather exaggerated behavior while I was attempting to sleep. Finally I said, "What are you looking for?" He said, "There's a mouse." Ok, now I'm awake. He had just found "evidence" of a mouse and was trying to find it. I was impressed that he called it a mouse and not a rat. He has bad memories of rats in his apartment in the Bronx when he was growing up and he has always called even a little field mouse, a rat. So this was progress, but he had to leave for work before he could find it, leaving me home with the invisible mouse while I had to get ready for work. I watched "The Tale of Despereaux" not that long ago and was trying to concoct a friendly little mouse story as I got ready and I left without seeing a trace of it.

I e-mailed him halfway through the day and asked him to get some traps, whatever kind he wanted because I certainly wasn't going to be the one to check them. Cut to the end of the day - I get home a little before Lenny, get my snack, and start watching The Bonnie Hunt Show. Lenny comes home and says, "I think it's a bat." He had been thinking about the "evidence" and said it just didn't make sense that it was a mouse because there wasn't a clear trail. Then he started thinking about the series on the Discovery channel that we've been watching called Wild Pacific and there were these bats that would hunt for food on the ground and they would look like mice, so he figured their "evidence" probably also looks like mouse "evidence." So he goes upstairs again to check it out, comes back down the stairs, and says, "Yup it's a bat." He found it hanging on the curtain in our bedroom, where I guess it had been since that morning!

I told him to close the door to the bedroom and call Dad because I have a very vivid memory of sitting in the living room with my parents in our old old house on Sherman Ave., watching TV, when Dad suddenly told us to go upstairs and close the door because there was a bat in the living room hanging on the curtain. So I guess Dad told Lenny what to do but he also said he would be home in 1/2 hour and could come over, so we waited. He came over and asked for a broom and they went upstairs and got it out the window, somehow. I stayed downstairs. Then they went around the house trying to figure out how it got in, which they were not able to determine conclusively, so I suppose at any moment another one (or the same one) could find its way back in. Lovely thought. I was just glad that at least this time Lenny found it before we went to sleep that night and it started flying around the room.