LETTERS FROM HOME: OF MOUSETRAPS AND MEN AND SEA BREEZE MOTELS

Jan. 11, 1996

Dear Ken,

The first sign was a flash of movement so fast and small I shrugged and wondered if it was just something in my eye. A few days later DC asked if I'd seem our mouse. I guessed I had.

It came fully into view in the bedroom one morning. A lovely charcoal gray, stealthily emerging from behind the puppies' bed, then streaking back into hiding. There have been sitings since then in the bathroom wastebasket and the bird room.

The bird room houses DC's parakeets and finches and a large painting of macaws. You wouldn't think a mouse could squeeze between the bars of a bird cage, but it seems not to be a problem when there's birdseed to be had.

The problem is ours. How to 86 the mouse -- and I'm sure it's mice -- when there are puppies about the house, puppies who would lap up any poison, investigate any trap.

Our friend Chris says they'd only bother a mousetrap once. But she also says the old-style karate chop traps are hard to find. The new ones merely confine the mouse in a deadly prison of stress. That's no way for mouse or man to go.

The idea of prisons sickens me. I prefer the approach in the movie "Escape to New York," where the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes are given their own city to run. An island would be preferable. A pretty one populated only with people who need to prove they're dangerous.

Give us a call when you're ready to rejoin us wimps.

I guess I've been feeling imprisoned myself lately. Confined by the frigid temperatures to the warm caves of home and work. I want to blast off to some place with a Sea Breeze Motel and make like a biscuit at 400 degrees.

One Saturday night in New Orleans, another Ken and I finished our late bartending shift and drove east along the Gulf and stopped when we could drive no more. The sun was rising so we took off our shirts, rolled up our pants and fell asleep on the beach.

The urge for a rendezvous with the sun can be powerful and dangerous. We played a sunburned round of miniature golf, waved at Jefferson Davis' house and went home. Couldn't work for days.

I'd like to squeeze meaning from this story, about responding to the body's drive to mingle with primal forces and the chi of impromptu sorties into the unknown, but some days you just wish you'd remembered the Coppertone.

Soon we'll all be deep in the heart of taxes, which I think DC secretly enjoys. Not paying them, to be sure, but the taking account of, the books straightening, the filling in the blank spaces of it all.

I do not, in fact am not in contact with the state of mind in which a child is a tax deduction and life's transactions are viewed as a series of write-offs.

It's worse than that. I just don't like the idea that somebody can send me a piece of paper that says I have to do what they want me to do by the date they want me to do it.

DC is aghast that the license tags on my truck expired last month. Come and get me, coppers!

I'll get around to it and cheerfully pay the fine. I hope they send me to some minor-league lawbreaker island. One with a Sea Breeze Motel.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.