When Mice Fly

Thank God the holidays are wrapped up so I can take the velvet bag off of the dead mouse. I think it’s bad for the wings.

My daughter bought it for me for Christmas a few years ago. I guess the taxidermist thought it would be cute to add wings.  I can honestly say it was a complete surprise.  I had no idea…really.  No animals were harmed in the making of the flying mouse. No, I can’t really say that.  The taxidermy people use mice from a lab.  So the poor creature had probably been injected with Agent Orange or Napalm or Crystal Light prior to its demise.

I fastened her (pretty sure it’s a her) to the ceiling fan in my living room with a line of fishing filament.  When the fan is on, she appears to be flying in sweet little circles above my head.  My friend Vivian hates her, but it’s not personal.  She hates all mice and rats.   We can probably extrapolate that to include hamsters, guinea pigs, and gerbils.  There’s a name for it. It’s called musophobia.   It is one of the most common phobias, but don’t tell Vivian.  She wouldn’t want to be associated with anything that might be considered common.

I’ve known her for many years.  We met when she was a pencil-thin, high strung New Yorker going through a messy divorce and I was a lowly massage therapist working in a spa. Her mother brought her to relax.  Like the Prince and the Pauper, we developed an unlikely friendship that was mutually educational.  Now, these many years later, she is still an almost pencil-thin, high-strung, divorced Clearwaterite, and I am a lowly, fat office worker.

She taught me that crème fraiche is good on smoked salmon, but you shouldn’t eat the waxed paper that is in between the salmon.  She taught me that Eli’s deli is the same as Zabar’s deli, and that it’s perfectly acceptable to request a dinner-sized portion of an appetizer, like the potato blinis at Café Alfresco in Dunedin. The waiter was a little confused, but she straightened him out. I worried about spit in my food.

She taught me all about Isadora Duncan up to the time of her demise when her scarf beheaded her and that Princess Diana’s youngest was probably the progeny of the horse guy.

I taught her how to say f***  frequently, as well as how to accessorize with Chucks Converse sneakers.

I think I know her pretty well.

I know that she knows everything about art, even the juicy gossip behind it, like that the guy who painted ballerinas was probably a pervert.

I know she likes piglets and ducks …cooked to perfection.  She has famous friends.  She has impeccable taste. She gets headaches in a New York minute if the waiter takes too long with the food, when her mother asks too many questions, when I say something stupid in public, or if anyone is late by so much as five minutes.

So, since I  know she hates mice, I cover mine with a Crown Royal bag at the beginning of the Christmas season.  I know Viv will be around more  often during the holidays. I don’t want to risk being the reason for a headache should she drop by. But I always free the mouse in a symbolic end to the chaos of the holidays.

My friend David is tall and accidently smashed into it once.  I had to glue it back together with E6000.  Taxidermed creatures are creepy inside.  They’re like sad, empty, gothic piñatas.

Vivian is not always sophisticated.    Like when she smuggled four glasses of wine we didn’t have time to drink (at Applebee’s) out to the car in a tin bucket she found in her mother’s trunk.  She didn’t want it to go to waste.  I had to hold it between my knees in the back seat with her coat thrown over the top.  When we got back to her parents’ house she dumped it in the grass anyway.

Then there was the time she asked me to write a eulogy for Romeo, her parents’ finch.  We were going to have a nice spring burial in the backyard, but everyone’s schedule was too hectic.  Romeo is still in a box in the freezer.  He died six years ago. I don’t know where I put the eulogy.

She had an unfortunate encounter with Diahann Carroll in the Rainbow Room at the Carlyle that I won’t go in to because I can’t afford an attorney.

Still, even though I’m a lowly office-worker, Viv makes sure that I know how much my friendship means to her and how much she appreciates my writing.  I know she’s not lying.  Vivian wouldn’t bother to lie about friendship or the written word.  If my story sucked she’d have no problem telling me it sucked.  And if she did not value me as a friend, she would not spend at least one evening, every few months, sitting beneath a Royal Crown bag knowing full-well what’s inside.

Now I have to brace for Valentine ’s Day and that’s a whole other story.

~written by Deborah Klein, Safety Harbor resident blogger