Squeaking By in the Macho Department

Our housecleaning done, we settled into the normal rhythm of life in our Baja house: reading, eating, walking, napping, nipping.

Thanksgiving Day passed without event, except that about midday my wife was startled by a presence on the front porch.

“It’s a horse,” she exclaimed.

I looked around. Indeed, a horse was standing on the front porch, looking through a window. I got up and looked out the window. The horse started and backed off the porch. I saw four other horses in the yard. One was a colt. He had the awkward grace of all colts.

We had been visited in the past by a herd of cows, but these were our first horses. I went outdoors for a closer look and they trotted off. Cows are not as shy as horses.

Nothing else happened that day, except that Gomez came by with a load of firewood. He seemed unusually solicitous of our comfort. I wasn’t sure why, except that, perhaps, because there were no other tenants in residence he had more time for us.

We hadn’t seen a mouse yet, but the next morning my wife found a shredded paper towel on the kitchen counter. “Well, we’ve got one,” she said.

“There’s no such thing as one mouse,” I said.

That night before going to bed I baited two mouse traps with cheese and left them on the counter. They were the old-fashioned kind that I remembered from my childhood. Evidently no one had ever built a better mousetrap. It had a small wood base fitted with a spring, a bow, a locking bar and a pedal for the bait. You put the bait on the pedal, pulled the bow back on the spring, locked the bar to the lip of the pedal and waited for the mouse to take the bait, thus releasing the bow, which would then fly forward in a deadly arc, breaking the mouse’s neck. It was a miracle of simple efficiency.

I had little hope that it would work. Our mice were too clever to be caught in such an obvious device. But before she went to sleep that night, my wife heard a sharp clap, and the next morning she got up to find a mouse dead in the trap. The force of the action had flipped the trap upside down.

I felt like a Neanderthal male. I had not only produced our first light, I had killed the wild beast. I was untroubled by any philosophical maunderings about the sanctity of all life on Earth. The mice were our enemies and I would kill them when I could. That night I baited the two traps and set them out again.

On Saturday afternoon I turned on our battery-powered radio to hear the USC-Notre Dame football game. I wanted USC to win. I am not an all-out USC fan; I tend to favor UCLA. But when the Trojans are playing anybody but the Bruins I’m for them. Especially when they play Notre Dame. I hate the Irish the way I hate mice. I don’t know why. It’s irrational, but there it is.

Needless to say, the game was a disappointment. My wife was not emotionally involved. She spent the time addressing Christmas cards. When the game was over, with her usual perfunctory show of interest, she said, “Who won?” She never fully appreciates my anguish.

That evening I built a fire. That is to say, I lighted one of our chemically treated supermarket logs, and piled some of Gomez’s firewood on it. I was the bringer of light, the killer of beasts and the maker of fire. I didn’t see that there was much more that could be asked of a man. My wife cooked the food. I also opened the wine every evening.

I also spent some time watching a sailboat in the bay. This can be boring, but there is always a chance that a porpoise will surface, or a squadron of pelicans will come swooping in to dive-bomb the fish, or a couple of maidens will go nude bathing down at the pebble beach. The bay is a never-ending stage of unexpected delights. But of course nude maidens were out of season.

Disaster awaited us on the road home.