Jeoffry's first mouse

Remember not long ago when we predicted that Jeoffry would, one day soon, zero in a mouse?

That day arrived!

The other night we arrived home from, ahem, the theater. And there was a dead mouse sitting on Jeoffry's red Savers bag. That bag is his turf so that mouse was there for a reason.

Howard saw it first.

"There's a mouse here," he said. "A real mouse."

Then we called for Jeoffry but for the longest time he did not appear. That was weird and we were worried. Then he sauntered in from the front sun room. He had been watching the rabbits outside. He was really high on himself because of that mouse, you could tell. There was a new dignity about him, as you may see in the picture Howard took, visible up above.

Not to get too gross, but the mouse was intact and not gory. God knows what it went through, because as the poem "My Cat Jeoffry" says about the cat, "For he plays with his prey to give it a Chance." But the end was pretty anyway.

It missed the deadline unfortunately for my ground-breaking, sure-to-win-a-Pulitzer mouse story in The Buffalo News. But still, significant. This is a milestone for Jeoffry. It was like Leonard Pennario's first appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For Pennario there were many more concerts and for Jeoffry there will surely be many more mice.

He is earning his stripes!

Cat and mouse

The cat hears things we do not hear and he is fixated on a corner of the dining room. Sometimes out of nowhere he will go flying and zero in on this sliver of space between the wall and the china cabinet.

Something is there!

All I can think is that it is a mouse. Well, I am pretty sure that it is.

Once when I was sitting at the dining room table working on my Pennario project I heard this rustling. It was the tiniest sound but I picked up on it.

And so did Jeoffry.

Suddenly, soundlessly, he came walking in. He crept up to that spot and waited. And waited.

He did not nail the mouse on that occasion but at some point he will. Either that or the mouse, if it is smart, will go down the street to a house with no cat.

Meanwhile that is a picture up above that Howard took of the cat and his toy mice. The mouse in the lower left-hand corner is his particular pet. Sometimes he sleeps with it and I have seen him grooming it. We hope he will not have that relationship with the real mouse, one that fateful eventual day when they meet. But we do not think he will.

It changes my relationship with mice, to know that I am not alone and undefended. As Howard has said, every house has a mouse. And the cat is on duty. Meaning, he is always on duty! And he knows where the critters are. He shows marked interest in the lazy Susan which, we remember what once happened there. There was one other time that, again sitting working on the book, I heard a tiny rustle. On that morning the cat was napping in his carrier in the back room. I heard the rustle and thought, oh, too bad Jeoffry is in the other room asleep.

But no! I glanced back there and he had raised his head.

He was listening.

He heard!

He's my handyman

One of the many benefits of having a cat (pictured above, in a portrait by Howard) around:

Remember the fridge that I bought a couple of years ago? I was always hearing a kind of scratching sound behind it. A rustling and a scratching.

Could it be mice? I hated the thought. I have always dealt badly with mice.

So I decided it was not mice. It was this fridge, something with the mechanism. I tuned it out the way I would tune out an inferior pianist, a pianist who was not Pennario. It was just my lot in life, I decided. Out of all the new refrigerators in the world I happened to get the one that made funny noises.

Well.

These funny noises? I just realized today that they have stopped.

I have not heard them in I do not know how long!

As Howard said we do not know what the cat is up to when we are not around. It could have chalked up a kill, who knows.

Either that or the mice have simply packed up and gone somewhere else.

"Holy #$*&. You would not believe what has moved into this house."

Either that or that cat is a handyman.

He has fixed the fridge!