Due to our morning schedule several days a week, my wife is on her way to work and my daughter upstairs getting her hair nice and flat while I shower downstairs and the cats get into trouble, with the result that a clean but naked male person deals with the cat issues at this time of the day.

I think of you, neighbor, I truly include your peace of mind and sensibilities in my operational equations. If the situation appears likely to require more than a minimal amount of running around, as it did this morning, I am always careful to close the kitchen curtains (with the light off as I do so) in order to avoid subjecting pedestrians, for example, or you there across the street to involuntarily witnessing my activities.

This morning, grey cat made a funny noise outside on the welcome mat, a sort of muffled meow. Since it sounded urgent, and was not his projectile vomiting noise, I let him inside. As he passed me on his way into the kitchen, a shady expression on his face, I noticed a tail sticking out of his mouth.

I did what psychologists advise you to do in these situations and praised him while I turned off the lights, closed the door to prevent the escape of the mouse (because he had set it down and it had darted into the corner beneath the onion and garlic rack thing where the cat couldn’t get to it), closed the curtains and went through the cabinet looking for the proper Tupperware container (small enough to wield easily in tight corners, yet spacious enough to avoid further traumatizing the mouse), finally selecting one of the smaller microwave containers. I also took an unopened issue of the Japan Times from the counter, with which to hold the container closed once I got the mouse inside.

The important thing at this point was preventing the mouse from diving through the air vents in the moulding beneath the refrigerator. Because if it did that, it was home free. It could build a nest beneath our cabinets and have its babies and evolve.

I moved the onion and garlic rack, the mouse began sprinting along the edge of the wall, moving closer and closer to the air vent. The cat batted it around a little. I got the dish over the mouse, slid the newspaper under it, et voila.

Opened the front door, threw mouse in fairly gentle, low arc into the driveway, observed that I was naked on my front porch wearing only a Japan Times and a Tupperware microwave dish, expressed thanks that no children were walking to school yet and went back into the house, where the grey cat was having an existential crisis in the kitchen, which looked like this:

[Picture old grey cat torturing an invisible mouse.]

The end.

Oh, wait. Then I got dressed and took Gamma to school, whose hair was now perfect but expressed some dismay at forgetting both her lip gloss and her perfume.

That’s maybe your subconscious telling you that there are more important things than lip gloss and perfume, I said.

Yeah, mascara, she said.

Also, the red cat was playing with a mouse in the back yard.