Of mice and men

We’ve got a mouse problem at our house. This has been an on-and-off issue for the more than 20 years we have lived at our home at the end of the street, which is bordered on the west side by woods and the north side by a field of high grass, owned by a Tree Guy who disposes his old timber there. A ha! You are thinking. There’s the problem! The mice come from the woods, and from the old timber piles, and maybe from the small crack between our garage door and our driveway, or maybe through the holes in the pipes in the basement, etc. You may be right on one or all of these counts. But, here’s the thing! Who cares? My issue now is disposing of them. While I favor the “catch and release” plan, this humane approach concept is not shared in my house. But! This post is not intended as a referendum on rodent removal ethics.

Rather, this is about the assignment of blame, and the need for reason and rationality in an oftentimes irrational and random world. Random. We are so afraid to face this reality: Life is full of myriad random events and activities. Some are linked. Some have reasons for their actions. But so many times, the randomness stands alone as, well, random. And we, as rational humans, cannot grasp that and refuse to come to grips with that. We try to make sense of the senseless, all the time. This is what drives the 24-7 news cycle, talking heads, bloviating Social Media posts, and all the rest.

I think I’ve referenced before one of my favorite books of all time, called “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.” This is written by physicist Leonard Mlodinow. As a math/science guy, one of his functions is to provide order and meaning to things through math and science. But, as he points out in his book (which is far more complex than to be summarized here by a dimwitted track coach in a simple blog post), sometimes math, science – and everything else – fails to explain why things are.

I thought of this as the mice ran wild in our house last night. “We’ve got a BIG problem, we better call an exterminator or something,’’ my oldest son exclaimed in exasperation. Fun fact! He hates and fears mice. My daughter scurried to her room, cowering with the dog for safety. Good luck with that. My youngest son yawned and offered this bit of wisdom: “Mice are cool. So what?” And then he reverted to watching our favorite pitcher (Bartolo Colon of the Mets). “We leave too much food and too many clothing lying around,’’ my beautiful wife surmised. Highly accurate statement! However, is this the REASON for our scampering friends, who somehow elude our barking and excitable hound dog Sammie? Possibly, but probably not. The woods. The slight crack between the driveway and our garage door. The field in the back. The pipes. All more plausible theories. How about this one? We live in a rural area. We have mice in our house. A lot of them this year. It happens. We deal with it. And then, we do our best to cope with and deal with the next, most likely random, thing with which to deal. OK!