My Father used to teach at a high school here in Iowa. Anyway – One year he thought it would be nice to bring a little white mouse home for my sister. We had a hexagonal aquarium that sat dry in the garage for years, so this was to become the new home for this former laboratory mouse. She set up wood chips and a water bottle. Little containers with food in them.
One morning I went upstairs and noticed that she now had two mice in the aquarium. “What’s this”, I
asked her. She was just as shocked as I. Apparently a wild mouse found its way into this aquarium somehow and had made friends with this white mouse, who was female. You can guess what started happening soon after. yes – They bred like, well… Mice!
At this point my Dad decided that he should take over this situation, and dealing with it the best he knew how, started constructing these wooden structures inside of the aquarium with little round entrance holes and individual quarters for these mice. All the while during Dad’s construction process, the mice continued to breed. He fixed a screened lid to place over the top of the aquarium so they could not escape and the thing stayed in the garage for some time.
One day my sister and I were discussing the mouse experiment and we went out to the garage to check on it. Before we even got to the driveway you could hear it: this horrible squealing and chatter. We looked at each other with fear and wonder and proceeded closer to the aquarium. It was horrible! So many mice climbing clumsily over each other to get nowhere. Trapped inside of this hideous mouse condo from Hell. They had started eating their young and partial pieces of newborns were scattered about in there as well. We shuddered and left the garage. A week or so later I came home and saw Dad in the garage staring into the aquarium. He seemed fascinated by the whole scene.
“This is why there is so much crime in big cities,” he said, never removing his eyes from the hideous Bosch painting that lay in front of us. I don’t know if I said anything at that point. I don’t remember how or when the mouse condo “experiment” ended, but it did finally end.
Dad often tinkered in the garage and did a lot of things: built fly traps, cabinets, shelves, jars of nails with the lids nailed underneath shelves- typical garage activities. One day I was cutting something out on the jigsaw and I looked over and Dad was holding a chunk of wood in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. He had focused the beam of sunlight just so that he could burn a line in the piece of wood. A few minutes passed and I looked over at Dad and now he had the magnifying glass aimed at the dried grass clippings in the yard waste bin. Smoke started puffing out of the bin, so I grabbed a plastic milk jug filled with gasoline, held it up, and said out loud “hey-Mr. Science”!
He looked up, and realizing that he really was killing time in a bizarre way started laughing at himself. I have so many stories about Dad. I am sure you will hear them in the future. I thought this would be a good introduction to him.