39. About the Rats

Hello and welcome, I’m Renée Valentina and this is Musing Interruptus. A podcast meant for sharing thoughts, stories, enjoying idiomatic phrases and words in general. You can read along; the transcription is in the description of this episode. The idiomatic expressions are in italics. Try to get the meaning from the context and then look them up to see if you were right. If you like it, share it, but more importantly, continue the conversation. Today, About the Rats. When I was a child, such a long, long time ago I enjoyed stories about anthropomorphic mice. Fivel Mouscowitz is probably my favorite. I easily related to the Mouscowitz family because my parents were also migrant mice who came to America, following a dream of education, riches beyond their wildest imaginations, freedom, and cheese. I might be embellishing a bit or confusing things. It is actually I who have a thing for cheese. In any case, the mice. I have wondered long and hard about mice because they are not welcome in our homes. I admit, I would not share my cheese with them. I would not like to discover their colonies in my pantry. They belong in my imagination and movies and songs.  Another famous mouse that emigrated from the Old World to the United States is Ringo Star’s Scouse the Mouse!!! He clearly says he is an extraordinary mouse, like none you’ve ever seen!!! I can imagine Scouse the Mouse and Fivel becoming friends. Singing and cavorting, a story of two migrant mice out to make something of themselves. I can see the video sequence of the mice going to night school to learn a new trade, burning the midnight oil, learning by night, and working as taxi drivers by day. One has to work the pedals and the other the steering wheel. After night school, they hit the town and enjoy the clubs and museums after dark. There is a take in which we can see the mice laughing at each other because they reached for the same piece of cheese at the same time, the camera follows their gaze from the piece of cheese to them gazing into each other’s beady eyes. This is precisely when Scouse and Fivel fall in love. That is when the music and mood change. Even the color pallet changes. There is light bouncing everywhere. They graduate from night school, get jobs in the city. Scouse is interested in real estate and Fivel decides to become a painter. He paints dairy farms across the country, inspired by country-American nostalgia. Never actually painting his true desire, cheese, he would just paint the place where it is made. As the years went by, the mouse couple felt something was missing, so they adopted a dog. Unfortunately, the dog was not clear that the two mice were family, as he did not grow up watching the Disney Rat and his pet Pluto. An untimely end for our friends Fivel and Scouse. The sadness in this story is replicated in several migrant stories. I myself, a migrant cheese-eating mouse have found myself in sticky tricky situations. The dog that the pair adopted sat on their home, chewed their things up, and urinated over everything. The relationship was strained. To say the least. Luckily, Scouse activated the migrant network to contact, a dog whisperer. Mr. Cesar Millán put everything in order, taught the mice to care for their pet and sooner, rather than later, they were able to buy another home, larger and more adequate for their pet. Not a sad ending. It was just a sad ending for their first home. What did you think the dog had eaten Fivel? Come one. However! This does remind me of another song about a rat. This is a sad one. I don’t even have to exaggerate it. The mouse is killed by the writer’s parents. Real life tends to be more difficult and sadder than art. Continue reading