This story is in honor of Dr. Seuss, his 40th birthday, and the many stories I used to read to my kids. Their favorite was “A Cat In The Hat”. Mine was “Green Eggs & Ham.”

This is not, however, a story for the kids. Ever since I can remember, keeping a box of "DeCon" mouse poison in the back of a cupboard was just as common as keeping laundry soap or other household chemicals on hand. It didn’t necessarily mean there were mice present in the house -- it was just a precaution we took, as did most everybody we knew. I carried this practice over into my adult life when I started keeping a house of my own. Now, even though I had never actually seen one, I knew there was a mouse in the house. For some strange reason, unknown to anyone to whom I have posed this riddle, the mouse started relocating the DeCon here and there about the house. Silly mouse. I would pick up a sofa pillow, and there would be a few bluish-green grains of DeCon -- not at all where I had placed them. I discovered some more in one of my boots, and even more in the laundry basket. They were beginning to appear everywhere. There was definitely a rude mouse in the house! "Ah hah!" I thought, "Got a mouse in the house? Take care of that... get a cat!"

So not only did I go out and get a kitten, I brought home her little sister, too. My thought was, "One cat for one mouse... two cats for the whole house!"

Well, my new-found peace of mind didn't last long. The kittens, it turned out, preferred me to any mouse in the house. They would not leave me alone! I would be trying to write, and they would be trying to climb up my leg. They almost always succeeded, whereas I almost never did. I discovered that as hard as it is to write with a mouse in the house, it's even harder with a cat doing that! Late one night, after falling asleep listening for the mouse in the house, I awoke to find one of the cats curled up on top of my head!

I decided I would not sleep with a cat for a hat, and I still had a mouse in the house, so I gave up, and returned the kittens.

After another spell of finding redistributed DeCon, I decided to get another cat, only this time I would just get ONE. I found a beautiful little white kitten with the prettiest blue eyes at the Payson Humane Society. I bought him some little toys to play with, and his favorite quickly turned out to be a mouse filled with catnip!

I knew that this cat
would be perfect and that
he would finish the mouse in the house!

Later that evening I went into the laundry room to add a bit more food to the new kitten's bowl. I decided this cat should be healthy and fat so he could rid my house of this mouse! When I reached for the bowl, there was the mouse... in the bowl... eating the cat's food! It occurred to me that not only was I feeding my cat, I was feeding the mouse, which was getting fat instead of the cat!

Now, if a mouse can look a person right in the eye, he did, just before he darted through an invisible opening between the baseboard and the floor. Just as the mouse’s tail disappeared, the cat (remember that?) who had been blissfully sleeping somewhere came around the corner, stretched, yawned, and sauntered over to the bowl to see what was for dinner. He noticed, right about the same time as me, the five or six little DeCon granules in his bowl.

He never even knew the mouse was there.
He didn't seem to know that he should care.
He certainly didn't know I was about to tear out my hair.

That very night, I got up in the wee hours to get a drink and to look in on the kitten, whom I had tethered to a clean bowl of food with a collar and leash I had made for him of bright yellow yarn. It had annoyed him at first, but he had fallen asleep before he could figure out what to do about it.

As I walked throught the moon-lit kitchen, I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye... there... in the shadows... in the middle of the floor! I froze in my tracks, then backed slowly to the light switch, never once looking away from whatever it was that had moved in the shadows. Click! In the now-blinding glare of the overhead light, I found myself staring at the mouse, there on the floor of my house! It was behaving very strangely, though -- kinda going in circles, wobbling around like it was drunk... or dizzy, maybe... or, dare I think it, poisoned? Yes! Within a few moments, right before my very tired and disbelieving eyes, it rolled over on it’s back and, uh, well... it died!

Now this was a real dilemma, because I didn’t know how to dispose of the mouse. Should I wait till morning and just let the little darling cool off, or what? I decided I couldn’t leave it there, so along with a huge bundle of paper towels, the mouse got tossed out of the house and into the back yard. Silly mouse!

Now, there really is no moral to this story, no special ending. Yes, the cat got fat, and there is no mouse in the house, but that's the way it should be. Why, there isn’t even a real photograph to go along with this story. There's just this happy memory of a silly incident in my “Never Dull” life. The best part of that memory was that it reminded me of another memory... of Dr. Seuss and "The Cat In The Hat" and "Green Eggs and Ham"...