"They're in the walls!"

The Matrix is one of my all time favorite movies. At one point in the movie, the bad guys are chasing the good guys through an abandoned apartment building. Up the stairs they go with the good guys running up ahead of them but running out of floors to climb up. 

Suddenly, the good guys are gone! They're hidden somewhere and eventually they are discovered hiding in the walls.

Living in the country naturally invites mice to move in. Try as you might, it is really difficult to find the tiny holes that they climb through to get ... into the walls! Yes, we have had a few mice running around in our basement. Sometimes you hear them but often you don't. 

They stick to the basement because we have two attack cats who chase them around and there seems to be some sort of truce. Mice stay in the basement and the cats leave them alone.

We had a lovely dinner tonight with Krista, Tucker, Kathy, and I enjoying a very nice lasagna that Tucker had prepared. Krista had told us about her day at work when we heard something ... on the roof? Maybe it was in the ceiling?

We checked outside and we checked inside and could not find anything!

And then we heard it again! It was bigger than a mouse or a rat ... and then there was a meow that came from the walls! Followed by another meow from the walls. 

We searched all over and Kai'a was definitely inside the walls! 

We tried a rescue from outside but no luck. Finally, I cut away a piece of wall in the bedroom closet upstairs and was able to pull her from inside the wall. She purred away in Krista's tearful arms and then turned around as if to go back in and chase another mouse!!

Here is the mystery that I will have to solve this weekend ... where is there a hole big enough for a CAT to climb into?

Lester White

Lester White died last week.

I read his obituary and thought about the big man and his full white beard. No, not Santa Claus but a real man who was kind and generous with a smile and a laugh.

Our first meeting that I remember was when I was six years old. He was Morg or Org or something like that and telling the older kids at a Methodist youth camp what it was like on his planet. Dressed up in a Halloween costume in the middle of August had to be brutally hot but there he was with rubber gloves, an overcoat, rubber mask, and a wig. To my six year old mind, Morg was a fraud. I knew he wasn't from another planet and I was determined to prove it. I followed him closely through the camp to his room and surprised him when he took off the mask. "I knew it!" I yelled. 
He laughed and roughed up my hair. "Do you think the older kids know?" he asked conspiratorially?

I shook my head no and we agreed to keep the secret. 

Through my grade school years and into my high school days, we'd see each other often. I'd see him at Church, youth group and I'd see him as I dated his daughters. His smile, his laugh, that beard, those quick quips were ever-present with me in some very formative years.

I struggled as a teen. I just didn't know how to behave. Was I a boy? Was I a man? I was trying to be an adult, always competing with the older kids and always trying to be mature ... pretending to be wiser than I actually was. He talked to me as I pulled his refrigerator away from the wall, "Hey, Big Wally!" He laughed giving me a new nickname, "Don't grow up so fast. This isn't a race where you are trying to be the first to the finish line. Enjoy your youth!"

He'd give gems like that often. 

Mom and Dad's friends from Church would go camping as a group. There were several times that we joined them and Les and Barbara White were there. His beard was somehow whiter and hair somehow thinner but in his heart and through his smile he was still the same youthful guy. He pretended to chase my kids around the campground and they pretended to be afraid. They laughed and they giggled, fell in the tall grass and rolled over and laughed some more. 

Les White inspired me to lighten-up and live life fully.

Thank you for your inspiration.