THE BORROWERS WHO READ BOOKS

My little Squeaky cat says one can't have too many mice to play with. What you see here is only part of her collection. Sometimes she has none available, and at that point we have to get down on our hands and knees to peer under every item of furniture in our house and locate the missing mice.

She is a funny cat. She will run across the room and position her left back foot over one of the mice, then do a funny kind of a two-step dance on it. She'll grab it in her mouth and run like crazy to the other side of the room. She'll put it down, watch it for a few minutes and then repeat the foot-stepping dance.

At bedtime, we put all the mice back in her "toy box" in the living room. In the morning we find mice in the bathroom, scattered all around the living room, and sometimes on top of our bedcovers. We never hear her playing in the night, but it is obvious that she does.

If I had to guess, I'd estimate that there are another 5 or 6 mice absent from the picture above. Before I took the picture I looked under the barrel chair, under the couch, and behind the china cabinet, where I was able to retrieve a mouse from each place. At least I am able to find a few more when I set my mind to it.

So the question is, why can't I find more of my multitudinous bookmarks than the four shown in the picture above? No matter where I sit, there is never a bookmark handy. If I am reading three books at a time (which sometimes I do), I might be lucky to have a bookmark in one of them, a receipt for a Starbuck's latte as a bookmark for the second, and a torn piece of newsprint in the third.

Everyone knows I read and everyone gives me bookmarks. At Barnes and Noble's today I bought myself a new one. On the way home I decided I'd get all my bookmarks and put them in a box; the box could stay on my desk so that I would always know where a bookmark was. When I came home and began looking, all I could find were 4. I have far more bookmarks than the cat has mice, but where are they?

I have looked in our kitchen's "Fibber McGee" drawer: no bookmarks. I looked in the 8x14 cake pan that I have sitting in the space between my two-drawer file cabinet and the top of my desk, placed there to catch all the little "Gadgets" I need to have at my fingertips (art gum eraser, key chains, 2 hand-held magnifying glasses, extra colored marking pens, a rabbit's foot from a Scottish tartan, several pairs of different size scissors, an emery board or two, a small staple puller, a small key-chain flashlight, a couple of AA batteries) but: no bookmarks.

I tried under the seat cushions of the couch. I got 2 pennies, a ball-point pen, a single dry "Wheat Thin" and a few crumbs, but: no bookmarks.

I have lovely bookmarks, some metal, some plastic, some paper. But today I cannot lay my hands on any of them. I suspect at least one might be under the piles of papers on my desk, but I just cannot see my way clear to clean off my desk this afternoon. Genealogists will know that this is a truly onerous chore and not to be undertaken until one is really desperate. I'm not that hard up for bookmarks at this very moment so I'll pass on the desk-cleaning. But surely I should have been able to dig up more than four!

I am reminded of the darling books about "The Borrowers," which were subsequently made into a TV movie back in 1973 and later into a regular movie in the '90s. Since learning about the Borrowers, my family has always attributed the disappearance of ordinary items (except for socks) to them. It is possible, I suppose, that the Borrowers read more than I do. If so, I hope they are finding my bookmarks helpful. If not, I sure wish they would give them back!