The Adventures of the Bondurants

(you should be humming the Indiana Jones theme song in your head right now…go ahead…dun da dun dun…dun da dun….)

Sometimes I really wish that I could just rewind my life a little bit and watch something that just happened.  Or better yet, share it with all of you.  I’m going to do my best to use words to give you a visual picture of what just went down in the Bondurant household.  So go ahead and warm up your imaginations, and picture this…

It’s about 8:30 p.m., and Jake and I are sitting on the couch eating some ice cream and watching an episode of Bones that he had downloaded.  Sam is sitting with us chewing on his tail or his foot or some other unmentionable part of his anatomy, while also trying desperately to sneak a little ice cream from one of us (unsuccessfully).  Jake’s feet are propped on the coffee table, and mine are cross-legged on the couch.  All of a sudden, from directly beneath me, out from under the couch comes a little creature that darts across the living room and behind the bookshelf next the the T.V. whilst I jump up and yell, “Jake! Jake! Jake!”  …that’s about all I could get out.  And just like that it was gone.  It was definitely NOT an insect and almost certainly had a tail.  At this point the show is paused, I’m standing on the couch holding Sam, and Jake is looking all around the TV and bookshelf for the aforementioned critter.  After some time, we determined that it must have found a way out (or that’s what we were telling ourselves), because it was no where to be found.  We weren’t really sure what we’d do with it if we found it anyway.  Somewhat reluctantly and cautiously we returned the couch (feet UP, of course) and resumed the show.

About 5 minutes passed, and then suddenly I saw it dart out from behind the book shelf and run along the wall behind the TV.  I quickly resumed my position of standing on the couch holding Sam, while Jake jumped up and stood in the middle of the room shouting “What do I do?! What do I do?!”, and I shouted back, “I don’t know! I don’t know!”  I mean, killing a bug is one thing, but with a mouse…well, it just seems MUCH grosser.  By this time, the little guy had run along the wall out from behind the TV and had started across the open floor into the next room.  I’m still standing on the couch, Sam in my arms, shouting “There it goes! There it goes!” and Jake’s following it shouting, “What do I do?!”  There happened to be a shoebox laying on the floor, and in a moment of quick-thinking, Jake grabbed the box and tossed it down on top of the little creature, trapping him underneath.  Whew.  We got him.  So now Jake is standing over the shoebox in the second room (we live in a shotgun, so sometimes we refer to our rooms using ordinal numbers), and I’ve moved to standing on the love seat (because I had a better view of the action from there).  Sam is still in my arms (I’d love to know what he was thinking at that point).  Jake and I look at each other both with a sense of relief that the little creature isn’t running free in our house anymore, but also perplexed at what our next course of action should be.  We are both entirely grossed out at the thought of killing it.  So I suggest that Jake call Charlie (our friend, pastor, and next-door neighbor).  I figure they’ve lived in the neighborhood longer than us, surely they’ve had encounters similar to this.  He’ll know what to do.  His pastorly wisdom was this:  take it outside.  Great.  Charlie had no advice as to how to get it outside.  It’s still just trapped under a shoebox on our floor.  I’m still standing on the love seat.  Sam’s still totally confused about what’s going on, but is remaining pretty calm despite the chaos around him.  Jake decides that he’s going to slide a file folder up under the box, and then flip it.  I was skeptical about how that would work out practically, but believe it or not, it worked (though my heart probably stopped for a second or two when Jake actually made the flip…I was just waiting to see a mouse go flying across the room).  I had to get down off the love seat to open the door for Jake, he took the box out into the street (a little ways down from our house of course), and he set the little guy free.  The elapsed time from the point when I saw the mouse reappear from behind the bookcase to the point where Jake set it free in the street was AT MOST 5 minutes (including the phone call to Charlie).  I so wish we had it all on video.  It would be so much funnier if you could actually experience the events themselves instead of just my recollection of the events.  Just take my word for it, it was a sight to see.  And now I’m going to go to bed and try to convince myself that that little fella was a loner who lived by himself.  He didn’t have a family.  I’m sure of it…