Friday, March 4, 2011

The Girl and the Mouse.



From the beginning of my Southern California chapter: Red felt pants with yellow patch buttons, stiff with age but fragile and barely able to hold themselves up. They stay in place because they formed around the tiny body they cover over the four decades. A robin’s egg blue bowtie stays shakily in place by a stretched out black band of elastic. Mickey Mouse, a vinyl doll version, bought on Main Street USA some forty years ago – he begged to join us on this leg of the Roadtrip and I almost acquiesced. But the fact that our clothing was packed tightly (one bag checked, one carried on, in an effort to save money i.e. That Elusive Thing) made the decision an easy one. It’s better to leave Mouse behind than to have Mouse get mangled by the baggage retrieval system at Orange County Airport (although I rarely worry about this particular airport, but you never know when the proverbial gorilla will kick the case across the floor and rap it against his cage bars). I can picture M. Mouse at my computer, watching for updates on Facebook, sipping from a little mug of black tea with milk.

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