This old mouse

This Old Mouse - A tale of attachment to our back time cottages

By Bob Tis

   So I’m sitting in the old cookhouse on a Saturday afternoon and I’m frosted. There has been a security breach. A mouse is sitting on the counter thumbing his nose at me. Why have all these fussy outdoor cats around if they will let a mouse just waltz in and embarrass my lame attempt at kitchen hygiene?

 Anyway this is a tiny mouse, but he has been getting bigger. Twice this morning he dined casually on the peanut butter bait on the rusty Victor rattrap but was too light to trip the spring. Now he is just walking back and forth over the trap, looking over at me at the kitchen table as if to say, “Hey, dude, how about getting off your fat butt and putting some more peanut butter on this faulty trap of yours.”

 So like I said, I was frosted. And for once I snapped into action. I grabbed the stick that holds open the window shutter and went right after Mickey Mouse. I slapped the stick down and missed wildly but I managed to cut off his tricky exit hole behind the stove. So instead the mouse reversed direction and went for the window, which had slammed shut when I grabbed the stick. He scampered along the sill, deftly weaving in and out of everything stacked on the counter by the window. An ancient can of food grade belt dressing went flying as the mouse zigged between bottles of olive oil and hydrogen peroxide and zagged through the plastic cup collection, scattering it all over the floor, while I lamely continued to give chase to this tiny invader.

 In a panic the mouse suddenly leapt onto an ancient white Panasonic television set on a cabinet next to the window. I feigned smashing the TV with the stick and the mouse, in his panic, noticed there was a bigger-than-mouse-size hole on the top left corner of the television. He dove in and all I could do was smile.

 Yes, of course there is a story to why there is a hole in the port side of my tiny television. There is a story to everything in this shack. It was built in 1956 from some remnants of an early project at Caneel Bay and on a quiet day the shack and its contents will literally tell you stories.

Lately, it is mostly quiet in this particular corner of Cruz Bay since the construction from the Grande Bay hotel has subsided. So now, all the crazy mementoes in the old cookhouse--the saved rocks, the three-legged stools, the carved Gobi’s and the glued-together shell sculptures--are all trying to tell their stories. They are competing with the old pictures taped to the walls, the myriad postcards all over the shelves, the yellowing newspaper from the day Obama was elected, the homemade instruments and the shelves of books, magazines and old papers. The walls have reminders of our shared collective history on St. John, stuff like 8 Tuff Miles medals and bumper stickers imploring us to “Be Kind” and advertising the “Old Cold Tater” bluegrass band. Other decorations denote more private adventures and parties. But everything here screams out great tales, historic local events, palpable life.

 So am I sentimentally attached to this place…of course. But I am also aware that I have a mouse in my television and a light bulb goes off in my head. I flip on the old t.v., which still gets a pretty fair picture from the rabbit ears I have duct taped up on the roof. There is a golf match on. I ponder it briefly and all of a sudden, like bread springing from a toaster, the mouse pops out of the television. It lands perfectly inside my empty sneaker on the floor. Amazingly the smell doesn’t kill this little pest and I am able to grab the old shoe and throw it out the open window.

Success! The mouse has been repatriated, perhaps down the hill to Grande Bay by now. The day is looking up.

Shortly after, this pretty girl down visiting from New York stops by. She says hello as she finds me happily drinking beer and watching golf on this sunny day amidst the strewn rubble from the great mouse chase.

She hands me my sneaker with a wary look.

“I know, I know, this place is full of crap,” I offer.

“Much like you,” she quips, clearly having my number.

But the truth is that she too is getting attached to this old shack. Oh, it took a while, some of the revisionist history is a bit of an acquired taste. The first year she came by to visit she looked at the ugly green peeling paint, the hybrid linoleum and the mountains of, well, crap that is on the walls, tables, shelves and chairs of this little shack and just shook her head. When she saw the toilet I think she was visibly scared.

 But it is hard not to fall in love with St. John, even it’s rough edges and quirks. In fact, especially it’s rough edges and quirks. And once you are in love it is impossible not to become attached.

May 2010

Have you read Bob's book Down Island? You should it is a hoot. Bob lives on St. John and is in a perrenial good mood, and we love that.