Starlight’s toy mouse collection.

Mouse?  Mouse!  Where’s the Mouse?

Starlight and I were playing with a new toy mouse last night.  I threw the mouse and Starlight chased it, grabbed it, tossed it, wacked it about, and brought it back to me.

Did you know that Siamese cats retrieve?  Well, they do.  At least they do until they teach YOU to retrieve for them, which was the game Violet likes to play.  She sits atop the cat tree and I  toss toys at her and she bats them away like a keeper in Quiddich.  Great eye-paw coordination.  Then I’m supposed to find all the toys, pick them up, and throw them again.  But I digress.

So I tossed the mouse again and Starlight chased after it again and it rolled under the hassock, which has a skirt so you can’t see under it.  Starlight dived completely underneath (she still fits), but soon emerged mouseless.

Dimensional shifting mouse?

“Where’s the mouse?” I asked her.   Starlight gave a telepathic shoulder shrug.

I saw it go under.

Starlight saw it go under.

Starlight FOLLOWED it under.

So I peeked under the hassock.  No mouse.

I looked out the other side and under the chair behind the hassock.  No mouse.

Starlight looked bewildered.  I probably did, too.

From my childhood, I knew that things sometimes dimensional shift.  This is not the same as misplacing an item and forgetting where you put it.

The other evening, I misplaced a pair of reading glasses and despite searching unsuccessfully for a long time, I gave up and went to bed.  The next morning, the glasses were still missing.  I finally found them when I decided to put some books back in a bookcase in my office.  There on the shelf were the glasses, which I probably placed there while looking for the books.  I hadn’t looked there during my search, I so can’t claim to know for sure that they didn’t dimensional shift, but it’s probably safe to say that they didn’t.

When I was a child, my sisters and I would throw a ball to each other on the lawn.  If one of us missed the ball, we could usually go right to the spot where we saw the ball land and pick it up to resume our game.  But not always.  Sometimes, we’d go to the spot and the ball had just disappeared.  Dimensional shift.  Weeks or months later, the ball might show up – in exactly the spot where we had looked for it!!

Starlight commenting.

But back to the mouse.

I carefully checked the entire side of the room where the mouse might have rolled or been batted by Starlight.

No mouse.

A little later, while talking on the phone with a friend, I spied a mouse of the same color on the far side of the room just sitting quietly with a few other cat toys.

Is that the missing mouse?

Did it not only dimensional shift, but shift in space as well?

I’m not sure we’ll ever know.

But you and I and Starlight will know that toy mice CAN dimensional shift.  Hmmm.

Namaste,
Nedda