I tried nearly everything. Kindness. Threats. I
even borrowed More Cunning than Man: A Social
History of Rats and Men from the library.

@ Lhe first chapter I tumed to, Eating Well is the
“Best Revenge, had the English poet laureate
Robert Sothey predicting that man would defeat
@ the rat only when he made him a table delicacy.
as. People have been eating rats and enjoying
them,” the book informed me, “much longer than
many. people would care to admit, or even
contemplate.”
I digit feel like contemplating this so I flipped

rs er

residents “air-mailing” their garbage (throwing it
out the window) for fear of using the basement
| incinerator room, where there may be a mugger
ey lurking.

Life in Harlem couldn’t really be compared to
life in Sidney where crime means the occasional
#4 theft of a dinghy, and a criminal is someone who
: ees his lawn on the wrong alternate day. I set

book aside.

The exterminator, who’d been by earlier, had
been less useful. He said rats were a small price to
i pay for owning waterfront property. What I had,
#4 We said, was a new breed of Yuppie-type rat who
# also preferred a home with a view.

The carpenter I'd hired to rip out the walls
where the rats were nesting said I was lucky, too.
My rats were discriminating, he told me. They'd
even been choosy about what they lined their
hests with. My rats liked literary supplements.
= [he one thing I hadn’t tried was poison. It
| wasn’t humane. But when the exterminator told
me rats had been known to cut into the bellies of
sleeping infants, I decided to be inhumane. The
Yuppie-type rat had developed an immunity to
regular rat-poison so the exterminator left me
vith a grocery list.

He said a perfect gourmet dinner for today’s rat
might be: :

Appetizer: Honeydew melon or cantaloupe.

Salad: Tomatoes and commeal with walnut oil

ressing.
~ Entree: Fish-oil-fried hamburger wrapped with
bacon.

Dessert: Sliced apples and pistachios in molas-
ses sauce — all laced with his new-age poison

, he assured me, would make the rats head
for water.

Problem-solving on the Peninsula

areas, like Harlem, a rat problem is due to

That evening, when I’d tucked my infant
daughter safely in her crib, I laid out a feast. My
house sat on a cliff overlooking the beach and I
was still awake after midnight thinking of those
gorged rats breaking for the sea.

That’s when I heard the splash. As if I didn’t
have enough problems already, now I had Charles
Manson on early parole coming through my
bathroom window.

I needed a weapon. I picked up More Cunning
Than Man and headed across the hall.

There was a rat swimming in my toilet. I closed

“my other pi roblenie: Ay ioe CeO yO

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flushed the toilet. But when I peeked inside I saw
him doing the backstroke rapidly towards the edge
of the bowl. I closed the lid again and sat down on
it to think.

Who could I call on for help: The cunning man
in my life was away sailing so I had to resort to
friends. When a rat falls into your toilet you soon
find out who your friends really are.

it was 1 a.m. and I didn’t have any who were
awake. I tried the Crisis Line, too, but hung up
when I was asked to hold. Finally I roused the
French chef who lives across the Peninsula.
“Pierre,” I said, “There’s a rat in my toilet.”

There was silence. Knowing how a major
characteristic of French cuisine has been its
willingness to experiment, I waited for him to
suggest fishing the rat out with tongs, brushing it
with a light layer of olive oil and sauteeing it
slowing with shallots.

“Hit it with a frying pan,” he said, and hung
up.

I locked the bathroom door and put a heavy
chair in front of it. Then I returned to bed, leaving
the light on, and telling myself chivalry was not
dead. Pierre would drive up in his white Rolls
Royce and deal with the problem for me.

I fell asleep waiting for that to happen, and the
fat drowned. In the morning I found his bloated
body nudging the shore of the bowl, and tried to
write a poem about it. Until my daughter, who
was being toilet-trained at the time, found the
corpse and started screaming. I imagined her still
in diapers at 25, and her psychiatrist saying it’s all
my fault she refuses to trust a toilet and her suing
me for a wrecked childhood .

But that’s a future problem.

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ontinued from Page A9

I had hoped to have good news
‘or you regarding “himself’s” hip
peration, but, like many others,

© four days in hospital, he was

nt home as they couldn’t find a

operating theatre until Friday

how!

July 20th. We won’t complain
though, as his is not a life-
threatening situation, but it turns
out that waiting isn’t that easy,
either. Hard on the morale, some-

Now, off to Vancouver to hold

“himself’s”” hand. I should men-
tion that Jane Sloan, who has been
minding things for us, has done a
magnificent job of helping Len
keep everything watered. This has
taken a real load off my tiny mind!
Friends are really wonderful,
aren’t they!

Hotel Sidgey's

Pat
SNICKARS

Bonnie

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BEACON TRAVEL
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Brentwood —_

. Jo-Anne

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652-3981