If you live in a big city, or perhaps someplace that’s simply crowded, finding parking may be an issue for you as it is for me. All though we have a garage and a parking space, we also have three cars which means someone has to park on the street and that’s usually me.
Sometimes I’m fortunate enough to find a space with plenty of room to pull up in, right out front. Other times I find a space with not so much room, forcing me to practice my parallel-parking skills, but still right out front. Then there are those times when there are no spaces right out front that I can easily maneuver into, or meticulously squeeze into, leaving me with no other choice than to go further down the street. On this particular occasion that I am about to lay out, that was the case. I ended up parking several fourplexes down at the end of my street. It would have been the perfect spot had I lived in that building, but I did not.
To save money on gas, and get in some exercise at the same time, I walked to work for a couple of days after I parked there. Since I usually just go to work and come home (I know, you envy my social life don’t you), I didn’t need to use my car at all that entire time, so I just left it there.
When those couple of days were over, and I didn’t feel like walking the 1.9 miles to work anymore, I decided to take my car to work instead. That’s when I was met with a surprise…waiting for me on my driver’s-side door.
I remember approaching my car from across the street and seeing it there, wondering what it was, though having some idea, but not wanting to believe it was true. With every step closer, the object became undeniable. You could say the tail was a dead giveaway – pun intended. There stuck on my car, on that rubber seal where a rolled down window disappears into was half of a dead mouse.
I was horrified. What a sickening sight!
So disgusted was I, in fact, that I couldn’t even bring myself to enter my car through the driver’s side, and opted to climb over from the passenger’s side instead. Just as I headed around to the passenger side, a woman came out of the fourplex I was parked in front of and sat in a chair on her porch. She never looked at me, didn’t seem curious as to why I was getting in my car on the passenger side. She just sort of looked off into the distance, with a smirk on her face. So creepy.
As I pulled off and drove to work, I was hoping that the speed of the car would make that nasty little sucker fall off, but nothing doing. I looked over to see if I could get a better assessment of what it was, like maybe it wasn’t a mouse, maybe it was just a ball of fur, a stuffed animal. But that little mouse foot sticking up at me, which I couldn’t see from the outside dashed any hopes of that. I was dealing with the real thing. Just gross!
My initial thought was perhaps this was an accident. Maybe it fell out of a tree? I was, after all, parked under one. Maybe it fell from a bird’s mouth as it flew over? It was, after all, only half a mouse instead of a whole one. Perhaps it was any natural circumstance for which a half a dead mouse would find it’s way stuck to my car door.
However, the fact that it didn’t fall off after I drove off reaching speeds of up to 50 mph, and the fact that it literally had to be knocked off with a broom handle at the car wash, not to mention the fact that after I went through the car wash a small patch of its fur still remained attached to the glue that was used to secure the vermin to my door (not so fun fact: though I’ve gone through the car wash at least 10 times since that day, there is still a small patch of that rodent’s fur on my car that refuses to come off), I realized that this was no accident or act of nature. Someone purposely glued that mouse to my car.
Once it was clear that this was deliberate, the first thought that came to mind was why me, and who did it. Was it that creepy lady who came out onto her porch as I eased into the passenger side? Was it a neighbor who lived closer to me, or was it completely random? Who knows.
What I do know is that I was mad. I was mad that the dead mouse was on my car. I was mad that I had to get in and out of my car through the passenger said several times before I had the chance to go to the car wash and get that thing off of my car. I was slightly embarrassed that I was driving around with this creature on my car. And I was also upset that I didn’t know who was behind this and why.
But.
I’ve also been on this kick lately, where I intentionally try to turn bad situations into opportunities. I’ve had a lot of bad shit happen in my life – I guess as we all have. I’ve had a lot of good shit too, but the bad can often times overshadow the good, especially when things don’t go my way and I focus on that more than I focus on my blessings. So I decided to start getting into the mode of making myself find the good in bad situations on purpose.
This whole half-of-a-dead-mouse-stuck-to-my-car thing, presented the perfect opportunity to exercise this skill that’s incredibly difficult to master. So that’s what I did. I literally forced myself to come up with a list of things experiencing this bad situation caused me to be grateful for. And the list goes a little something like this…
- I’m grateful that I have eyes that can see which allowed me to spot that dead creature on my car.
- I’m thankful that I have a car, and a paid off one at that, that someone can stick a dead mouse on.
- I’m grateful that I’m able-bodied enough to walk and maneuver so that I could enter my car through the passenger side, and crawl over to the driver side.
- I’m thankful that I was walking to my car to go to work, which means I have a job and a paycheck, and that I have use of my legs.
- I’m thankful that I had the money to take the car to the car wash and have the guy take the mouse off.
- I’m grateful that the mouse is no longer on my car.
- I’m thankful that this experience gave me something to write about.
Of course this whole dead-mouse thing is quite trivial an issue in the grand scheme of things. I’ve had much worse problems than this. So I guess I’m also thankful that overall, this was quite inconsequential. Look at me, there I go again. I think I might be getting the hang of this.
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