Of mice and me

My summer at Frosty’s ended peacefully. Although I never aspired to be his employee again, I had learned that businesses often conceal certain issues from their clientele. This was confirmed to me the following summer, when I was employed to work in the office at Parksville’s Sunnyland Hotel. I was paid $150 for the season, to do a myriad of office jobs including selling stamps, sorting arriving mail for guests, and announcing incoming, always long distance, phone calls on the hotel’s loudspeaker, which also served as the transmitter of the most important announcement of all, that a meal was being served in the main dining room.

Tucked away in the back hills of the town, a picturesque hidden place I had never even known existed, was a small hotel owned by a couple who had survived the Shoah, arrived in our town, and bought and renamed the hotel. It was soon populated with their fellow survivors, mainly from Hungary. Hungarian was the lingua franca for most of the guests, who feasted on delicacies from their homeland and enjoyed the immaculately kept property.

There, I became the keeper of a secret.

I was the daughter of a father who was terrified of mice, and I had inherited his phobia. Dad was mostly a very brave guy. I’d call him intrepid when it came to subjects that struck terror in the hearts of many of his peers. He never feared illness, actually never worried about the concept. Although he came from a family where three of his five siblings met death at particularly young ages, and his mother died before reaching 50, he proceeded to continue his nearly lifelong cigar habit, eat all sorts of food dripping in cholesterol, and live life as if it would go on forever. He was practically never sick, didn’t bother with doctor visits, and lived a robust life until a few days shy of his 98th birthday. He certainly didn’t fear his car breaking down, which it often did, mainly due to exploding bald tires that he never deemed worthy of changing before the blowouts. And he certainly didn’t worry about our schoolwork or, later, boyfriends, rightfully expecting us to make the best decisions, which we certainly did. He was madly in love with Mom, with whom he never argued until she up and died years before him. That was unforgivable and also totally unexpected, since he was seven years her senior. We expected him to wither and die himself soon after, but his lifelong optimism and persistence kept him vital for his many years as a widower.

His cigar habit was such that I often thought he must sleep with the soggy cigar soaking in his mouth. He didn’t, but Mom was often on a campaign to rid him of the habit, which she said ruined his clothes and smelled, well, like cigars. Once he had the flu, a rare event indeed, but it was miserable enough so that he didn’t smoke at all for the duration and made a commitment to Mom that he would give up cigars permanently. Daily, she would report to me the success of the new resolution, joyfully telling me that he wasn’t smoking anymore.

But then, he got caught, bringing dismay and shock to all of us who had believed him and knew him as a totally honest man.

I was driving down the street where my parents then lived, in a garden apartment complex in our town, Clark. I saw a man up ahead walking on the sidewalk, in a puff of smoke. The man resembled my father but I knew it couldn’t be him. No way. Not with that smoke surrounding him! My father didn’t smoke! As I got further along, I realized that it actually was Dad. I stopped and honked, and he realized the gig was over. He was caught! That finally put an end to his smoker’s life.

But aside from that one aberration, he just went along with the flow, working hard and spending his leisure time with his head embedded in non-fiction books. He became a scholar of Jewish history, but somehow his basic optimism and joie de vivre continued in spite of it all.

It was only mice that frightened him!

Dad was known to jump on a table, even in the presence of women and children, if an errant mouse, a feral creature who had escaped the domesticity of someone’s kitchen, were to cross his path. His fear was palpable, and at times Mom, herself quite the heroine, was known to rescue him by catching the tiny creatures by the tail. The mountain lodgings, like our Bauman House, were perfect rodent refuges, providing largely deserted cozy winter hideouts where no one ever shooed them off with a broom or, worse yet, ensnared them in a lethal trap. It was only during the summers that humans noticed their presence and shared living space was simply not an option.

Except at the Sunnyland.

I never explored why the problem existed in only that one place. Even today it seems strange. But my stamp drawer, which I was called upon to open several times each day, had mouse occupants, possibly a family, or just one very busy single fellow. The first time I opened the drawer, I almost fainted from the shock of a particularly well-fed mouse quickly slithering away from me. Both of us were very frightened! I know that mice don’t slither in the way that snakes do, since I once had a snake under my bed at that same hotel. That creature was definitely no mouse and definitely did slither. But, to be honest, I never worried about the descriptive adjectives describing mouse moves. I was too terrified to do anything but scream. Loudly. I had learned well from my father that mice were not our friends!

My scream elicited a rapid arrival of the hotel’s owner, a tiny mustached man who wore a perpetual scowl. He rushed over to me and firmly denounced my terror. It was only a mouse, and if I were to ever respond that way again I’d be fired. Immediately. There would go my $150.

From then on I created various noisy ways to pre-announce my intentions to open the drawer. I never suggested a mouse trap, since the very idea of opening the drawer to a dead mouse was somehow more alarming than interacting with a live one. Not that we had become friends, but I only wanted the little rat, as I called him, to stay clear of me. I didn’t wish him death.

That summer finally ended, and I found myself $150 richer. Even in 1956 there was not much to buy for $150! But the following summer, as I know now but didn’t know then, was the summer I was to meet my bashert.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 11. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com