There was a guy who came to work at the Daily Camera when I was there. We hit it off right away.
After he was there a couple of weeks he came over to my desk.
“I’m not coming on to you.” For the record, this is never a good thing to say to me, because it makes me wonder why the hell not. “But I gotta tell you that you feel familiar to me. I feel like you’ve been my best friend for years. It’s weird.”
We became great friends. He got along with my husband. We shared a lot of laughter, and when he met the girl for him, I gave him advice behind the scenes.
One night they came over for a dinner evening. We thought it would be fun to make it a formal event.
I cleaned and decorated. I made a tremendous meal. I fixed up a beautiful table.
But when we were having wine and conversation in the library, my 4-year-old son came in and stood near the center of the visiting.
“I think I found a clue,” he announced.
He was looking down at the center of my Oriental rug.
There was a big dead mouse there that none of us had noticed. It had cat-teeth punctures in its side.
Scott made a face of considering. He nodded, “No, buddy, I think you’ve solved this one.”
That was it. The playing grown-up had cracked. We burst into laughter, and in my gown and rhinestones, I scooped up the mouse and burped.
December 7, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Talk about a rodent at a formal occasion. We had the wedding of my youngest son Marc at our house. About two weeks before the big event my wife began smelling a foul odor. It got worse every day and we suspected a dead rat. We called an exterminator who could not locate the source except that it was worst in the front bedroom area. He drilled holes in the walls, shone lights, probed around, all to no avail. The morning of the wedding day arrived and all we could do is close the double doors to the bedroom and barricade them with the gifts table. We hoped that most people would remain outside in the backyard. We did luck out with the weather. It was not until a year later, during a rainstorm, when there was a small leak in our roof and I removed an upstairs wall panel to check it out, that I came across the rat’s carcass. Also about a year later the marriage ended in divorce. We should have smelled a rat (the metaphorical kind) early on when Marc’s wife decided she could not abide living with him in Paris where he was studying drama.