One Saturday when I was twelve, my mother, brandishing a dust mop, flushed a mouse out of my Fibber McGee’s closet.

My cat, Ashley, brought in as a consultant, caught the mouse, his first, and pranced toward me with his offering.

I screamed and jumped onto the bed.

Ashley dropped the mouse.

The mouse ran back into the closet.

Ashley spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the windowsill, staring out across the yard, refusing my mother’s pleas to try again.

“Ashley was proud of himself. He was bringing you a present. You hurt his feelings.” My mother spent the rest of the day glaring at me. It wasn’t about Ashley’s feelings.

Ashley resigned from his post as Head of Household Rodent Control.

I spent the rest of the day trying to civilize the closet.

I have no idea what happened to the mouse.

I don’t remember Fibber McGee’s closet myself, but I was told it was a dead ringer for mine.

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Read about Fibber McGee and Molly at Wikipedia.

Listen to recordings of over 1,000 episodes of Fibber McGee and Molly at Internet Archive. (And if you come across the episode in which the phrase “Politics makes strange bedfellows” generates some confusion and considerable laughter, please leave its number in a comment.)

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Image of mouse by Zachariah Kyle Pieterse from Pixabay

Image of cat by Zachariah Kyle Pieterse from Pixabay

Image of Fibber McGee’s closet by Dell Publications. Publisher and copyright information are on the magazine’s page 3., Public domain, via Wikimedia