Last week, while I was riding my bicycle along Snelling Avenue, I saw a dead rat. It was a little flatter than your average rat, to be sure, but otherwise ordinary. While I’m sure that most of you don’t care about rats (or reading about them for that matter) I am a little bit intrigued by their habitation in big cities. Truthfully speaking, we all know that the rats are there, however unpleasant or uncomfortable that knowledge may be. The thing that troubles me is that I never see any evidence of these small, scrappy citizens. Sure, I can occasionally see a shadow slithering into a dumpster if I am walking near a particularly good restaurant at midnight. Shadows though, are by nature a little rough around the edges, lending the possibility of many small forms that could be casting that rat-like shadow. We can tell ourselves, “That may not be a rat. Keep walking.”
So I grow accustomed to not seeing rats…and then one pops up, willy-nilly, in my path. And I am forced to think about the rats. Where are they during they day? Do they get tired of prowling and shadowing all night and then sleep the day away under our houses? And why do they so rarely show their dead, little, ratty faces on the street? It might be that they are so smart that they can usually avoid cars, unless they are sick or disabled like the weaker rats in “The Secret of Nimh”. It might also be that the quantity of cars passing a given rat crossing at 3 o’clock in the morning is significantly smaller that the quantity that passes that same spot during the day (when it is called a squirrel crossing). Could it also be that we can know that the rat population is smarter than the squirrel population because the rats have learned to adapt the traffic flow, while the stupid squirrels just keep running across the damn street in the middle of the day, causing me to suffer smallish heart attacks?
All these scientific rat theories aside, I was thinking how this blog is like the rats. That is nice isn’t it? The jist of it is that although you may not see knitting going on around here, it is not because the knitting is not happening. More than likely, the author is just busy or disorganized or has to use a dial-up connection from 1943 to post her entries or she is “lazy” in her own busy way. Or it could be all of the above. Or maybe her husband broke the digital camera while taking pictures at a friend’s bachelor party and conveniently “doesn’t remember” the breaking of the camera. Who knows? However, there are rats in the vicinity.
LOL. Shadowy memories are best kept that way, in my experience. Glad you're out there, pondering life's dilemmas. Another package coming soon...
Posted by: YSP | Monday, July 25, 2005 at 02:31 AM
Truly deep-seated issues... comparing yourself to a rat. Oh my!
Posted by: Helen | Monday, July 25, 2005 at 06:02 AM
I just reread it. I get it now. Perhaps I'm the one with deep-seated issues. :-)
Posted by: Helen | Monday, July 25, 2005 at 07:47 PM
Just to clear up the confusion, I think that my knitting progress is like the rats. Just out of sight, maybe not there at all. I am not a rat. Hopefully I am not even like a rat. You tell me.
Posted by: else | Tuesday, July 26, 2005 at 02:04 PM
During the day, they are at my subway stop. All of them.
...Well, at least five or six of them, at around 7 in the morning. They're scarily good at survival. I swear of seen at least a dozen of them get run over by a subway car and then go back to gnawing on wires.
Posted by: Gwen | Sunday, July 31, 2005 at 02:21 PM
I've only seen that many rats once. In a former apartment building they would crawl up from holes in the floor whenever there was no human activity in the room. Luckily, my unit didn't have any holes, At least there weren't any at that time, but I don't envy the new tenants. Not. one. little. bit. Nope.
Posted by: else | Sunday, July 31, 2005 at 04:48 PM