Flight of the Mouseling and a Cure for Literary Constipation

As pressure mounts from the outside to continue with this project I find myself terribly blocked and despite a diet heavy on literary bran muffins, I still can’t squeeze out a single word worth publishing. Indeed it has been some time and we are long overdue, but words don’t really do it justice. The depth and breadth of the change we have undergone over the past month or so has, in fact, left me speechless. Oh, I gave it the old college try a time or two, but to be honest it was a bunch of crap. Tedious paragraphs about packing and unpacking, shuffling about in a mindless fog of logistics. It was all just about as dry and lifeless as a popcorn fart. The longer I sat staring at a blank screen the more perplexed I became as to what, if any, direction this project should take. With an absolute gold mine of experience in the palm of my hand, why waste a single breath on the mundane reality of yet another international move. To be completely honest, it was fairly uneventful. Certainly, there will be memories that last the test of time, but are unlikely to translate in my broken prose. Still, I felt uncertain where to start and then it hit me . . . MOUSELINGS!

Anyone have the slightest clue what you call a baby mouse? Perhaps this is nothing more than my final break from reality under the burdensome strain of a life in flux, or maybe it is simply my way of getting back to where we started . . . back to the usual unstable meanderings of my mind. As I spent yet another mindless hour on the road, portaging my children to and fro, it struck me as odd that in all my years on this planet I had failed to learn what a baby mouse was called. A cat . . . kitten of course. Dog . . . a pup. I even am acutely aware that a baby Alpaca is called a Cria. Hatchlings for Aligators and calf for most of the larger hooved varieties of mammals wandering the hills and valleys. A deer has a fawn, a horse has a foal and some fish have fingerlings . . . but what in the hell does a mouse have? As it turns out they have pups, kittens and something called a pinkie. WTF? Stumbling across the answer to my query on the interwebs, I became hopelessly quagmired in some intensive research that eventually led me to an even more interesting topic. As if the English language isn’t fascinating enough in its oft times counterintuitive nomenclature for our offspring, the conventions for naming groups of things is more interesting still.

A group of mice, for example, are known as a “mischief”. And though I have never seen more than one owl at a time other than in a zoo, a group of these nocturnal predators is known as a “parliament”. Everyone knows a “troop” of monkeys and a “pride” of lions, but have you ever seen a “business” of ferrets or a “coalition” of cheetahs? Bears come by the “sleuth”, badgers by the “cete” and peafowl by the “ostentation”. That last one actually makes a great deal of sense in my humble opinion. Between the “rookery” of penquins and the “crash” of rhinoceri, I found my head swimming like a “squad” of squid. Human beings are worse yet. We come by the boatload or the busload; in a crowd or a gang. We come as a mob or even a tribe. We are known by the mass or a huddle and some have even come as a horde. There are multitudes and legions, families and flocks. Hell, we even come in something called a “dispora” . . . whatever that means. We congregate as troops and create a rabble or scrum. It seems there is no limit for how we combine, by the throng or the wave, we come just the same. The noise of it all would silence a “murder” of crows.

So, for better or worse, these are my thoughts for the day. Maybe tomorrow I will have something meaningful to say. The best I can hope for now is that this contrivance will have the desired laxative effect and I won’t again be absent for so long. See you next time. R