Earlier this evening, while doing laundry, an enormous, lone blueberry I’d forgotten about in a jacket pocket and dramatically missed on the way down landed unceremoniously on the basement floor before rolling far away under one of two massive appliances. Thinking I’d come back and get it with a flashlight in a little bit, it was hard not to feel a little annoyed.

So much to do today, I thought; and it probably wouldn’t be a good idea just to leave such a sizeable mouse meal out in the open.

For about a year, I’d been engaged in a high-stakes, but wordless, battle of wits over the best way to deal with a little mouse who’d moved into my family’s house after the passing of two much-loved cats during the pandemic. Justin hid in my closet, mostly, but it was weeks before I actually saw him and realized he was not a resident of the walls themselves. While I’d, I thought ingeniously, tested the gummy multivitamin as a seemingly perfect but ultimately ineffective partitioned live mouse trap bait, another household member had eventually resorted to the other kind despite protests. So, nightly, I scanned the premises for any danger that needed to be neutralized.

But, so far as I know, neither Justin nor any other little creature had been spotted in months.

That was, until I saw him.

Sitting quietly, right in the middle of the kitchen, and completely unperturbed by my presence and most likely unintentionally welcomed while house construction during the day had meant frequently opening doors, Chesterton was humbly enjoying a treasured crumb he’d found on the floor (a feast!) like an improbably little, but rotund, floofy Augustus Gloop poof of cute.

After all the to do over his predecessor, I paused to pray about how to proceed and was, actually, surprised when I felt inspired simply not to worry at all. And, admittedly after trying a few times to place an empty cardboard box over who may have been the most nonchalant animal I have ever met, I complied, hoping my new friend, who’d evidently decided to set up camp under the refrigerator awhile, would remain undetected by others until I could resume my rescue mission, probably around midnight.

But, almost as quickly as he’d entered my life, Chesterton was humanely caught and delivered outside by my pandemic cold war opponent, and now ally, before the night was over.

Still, I feel inspired to reflect a moment on Chesterton’s few-hour indoor odyssey. Unlike Justin, my pandemic mouse, who maneuvered his terrain no less expertly than I’d expect of the most competent Navy SEAL graduate, Chesterton excelled in calm. I don’t know what it is about mice that makes them so endearing, but whether it’s been Fievel Mouskewitz, the famous Ralph on his motorcycle, or more modern-day Célestine, for almost my whole life I’ve found stories centering on these little ones particularly heartwarming. (Just not Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is a circle.)

But in Chesterton’s real-life case, I love the way both unhurried temperament seemed to lead to such a quick, uneventful and harmonious re-placement right where he belonged.

On Waits

With regard to my blog theme, I have begun to recognize how essential timing at least seems to be in the identification and handling of harms I believe to be endemic to the publicly-traded journalism brand. While there do seem to be opportune times, occasionally, when some of the seeming tares and wheat separate just enough to make pointing out the difference possible – the 2016 election was a particularly obvious one – there also appears to be a rather diligent and ongoing effort on the part of these entities to keep such elements intertwined.

It is, increasingly, disheartening to hear politicians lament so-called “wokeness,” for example, without defining it clearly. They could just as helpfully malign “people who do things,” in my opinion. What things?, I frequently find myself wondering. And I continue to believe that the caricature – of heartfelt calls for social justice – put forward by media corporations in recent years was intentionally warped in order to elicit pushback as a preemptive defense against legitimate requests for internal reforms regarding abuses rife on their premises. Now that the term has been rendered close to meaningless, what is it but, like the democratic and republican parties, a tightly interwoven coalition of good and bad?

But, I am trying to take a cue from what seemed to me to be Chesterton’s calm confidence that, so long as he did his part, the rest would take care of itself. (Maybe, I’ve often wondered, something good could come of this. Maybe, even if they did not mean well, the external momentum media corporations have lent to legitimate social justice movements can be maintained while the more harmful effect linked to abuses tolerated within their ranks can be acknowledged and lessened. Maybe their business models will someday be seen as being like disposable rocket boosters that helped lift social justice movements out of and above the hindering effect of gravity. But I still don’t think so. I still think it would have been better for these organizations to be exposed fully and earlier.)

It’s now past 1 in the morning anyway. Chesterton is back outside and the blueberry is still under there. But please don’t tell. It might be all that stands between the next mouse and a poorly timed move.