Remembering a rat and a mouse!

May the Lord smile on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord show you His favour (approval) and give you His peace in 2024.

Numbers 6 : 25 -26 (NLT)

I asked my parents if I could bring home a mouse, so I must have known they were coming to school. I actually don’t remember their answer. I probably didn’t want to hear it!

We were living in Johannesburg, so I must have been about nine years old. Coming home from school, the green front door opened before I got up the front steps. There was horror on my Dad’s face. My new friend was called a rat, not a mouse by Dad. Well, his tail came down to my belt, and his head was snuggled into my white Peter pan collar of my blouse. Thinking about it now, how could a family of rats come to school and be sold?

I wanted this silly old rat , my mouse. I know I was influenced by Enid Blyton and her Mary Mouse cartoon books, which I loved, and I know Mum and Dad were well versed in cleanliness. He went back to his family at school.

The next time a mouse saying was used in the context of school or study was this Britannica Dictionary definition:

MICKEY MOUSE

Informal and disapproving: not deserving to be taken seriously: having little value or importance. Example sentence : ‘ He did a lot of Mickey Mouse courses at college.’

I was sitting next to my good friend Roy in first year mathematics lectures. Our lecturer’s favourite expression while pushing up his black rimmed glasses with one hand and waving a pointer in the other hand at a mapping or an equation was:

“It’s Mickey Mouse!”

Really.

Roy became my teacher.

Then, on 13 February 1989, Roy and I took our 7 year-old and 4 year- old sons to meet Mickey in Florida , in Disney World itself. We all loved it. Mickey Mouse represents everything that Walt Disney wanted to portray: happiness, fun, dreams, and the ability to bring families together. We did a lot: the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT centre, Cape Canavral, and then recorded in my writing at this time this paragraph:

We are at the Dolphin Hotel Tampa Bay on the beach. The sands are white, more like finely broken shells. Eric sat on my lap, and we made poems about the sea. It was a balmy red evening with the sea blue, the sand warm on our legs. One poem was about a fish that accidently swam from the river into the sea and discovered there were waves and then went back to the river deep with straight river banks… I write that it is a time with him that I always want to remember … I’m so glad I wrote about it then. The love between a mother and her four-year- old son.

Now, I read that parts of Mickey Mouse’s early life now belongs to us with his ability to walk on his hind legs, his three fingered white,gloved hands , red shorts and big rounded yellow shoes.

Given a bit of time, I might have dressed my rat enough to impress my Dad and Mum! Not on your life to impress them wouldn’t have been Mickey Mouse!

Thank you for reading another addition to my memories.

Sandy 🙂