A few days ago, I caught a rather large mouse in the act of eating a harvest pumpkin my mother had artfully placed on our living room table. I shooed him away, but left the pumpkin there. If he was going to be
eating things, he might as well finish what he started. Then the exterminator came, and though I'd hoped to find someone certified in green extermination practices, he lay poison behind my arm chair, where the mouse had set up camp.

Either the little guy succumbed, or he just moved to the kitchen. Some mouse, in any case, dashed across the kitchen from the bottom of the
refrigerator to the bottom of the dishwasher the other afternoon.
Yesterday morning I caught a glimpse of him, at the base of the trash can, before he scurried back under the dishwasher, leaving his tail trailing. I swooshed him with a broom and he pulled it in behind him.

This mouse was least of my problems. I needed to call the exterminator
again, and to seal a loose board on the roof. But that would have to wait. My attention is focused on my son, who has been having a rough time since a recent hospitalization for severe anxiety and panic attacks.

He had put up a happy front in dealing with his troubles for several weeks, but now he was beginning to feel worn down. And pissed off. What's that stage of grief? Anger, without a doubt. Why did this have to happen to him? It isn't fair. The good humor that bookended his anxiety began to give way to sullen resentment. It broke my heart.

And
then, yesterday, our youngest dog, Pudge — the incorrigible runt with a Napoleon complex — thrust himself under the telephone table, his bushy, fox-like tail wagging madly. He'd found the mouse!

My son shooed Pudge away, but not before the dog had mangled the mouse's back legs. I grabbed the broom and swept the rodent out the back door onto a rug on
the patio. My plan was to go back inside to get a plastic bag (oh, evil
plastic bags) to, well, asphyxiate him and then deposit him in the
trash.

"That's worse than leaving him to the dogs," my son
protested. I explained to my son that a practically lame mouse didn't
stand much chance of surviving in the wild, or even in our backyard,
with
dogs and the occasional stray cat. I asked him if he wanted to build
him a cage and make him a pet.

He wanted to flip the mouse over
to see if the mouse could walk. All he could manage was to pull himself
forward a few inches, looking up at us with his little worried eyes. I
gave my son some cardboard to make him a shelter and a little piece of
cheese. The mouse lay there, his head in the grass, munching on clover.

"Maybe that soothes him," I said. I didn't know if my son saw himself in the mouse's eyes, the way I did.

Whatever
he felt, a few hours later, he had the best therapy session he's had
yet. He came out feeling better, his resentment gone and his hope
renewed.

We checked on the mouse when we came home. He was
still breathing, but he'd stopped eating. He still looked up with his
worried eyes.

Later that night, laying on the couch, my son
wondered if he'd wanted to save that mouse because he'd read that
psychopaths are cruel to small animals. If he cared about the mouse,
then he wasn't crazy. "Maybe that's why," he said, "I wanted to make
sure I was kind, even if there was really nothing we could do."