One of the best teachers that I ever had the pleasure of working around was a lady by the name of Barbara Howell.  She was a math teacher extraordinaire who I believe could teach a turnip green to do math.  I also found out one morning in a pretty convincing way that she was deathly afraid of mice.

At the time of this incident, Barbara was working as a curriculum specialist for part of each day and teaching upper level math classes for the remainder of the day.  On this particular morning, she and I were engaged in a discussion just inside the door of my office about some math curriculum issue.  We were deeply engaged in this discussion when it all started with no warning what-so-ever.

My office door was located at the end of a hall adjacent to another door that came out of our data processing room.  Unbeknownst to me and not visible from where I was standing, a small mouse came running out of the data processing room, turned the corner down the short hall and came into my office.  At the sight of the mouse, in the middle of a sentence and with no indication that she was about to take action, Barbara Howell let out a blood curdling yell, jumped about three feet straight up into the air, landed on a coffee table, jumped from the coffee table onto a couch, and sprinted across the couch to the corner of the room all in a matter of about 3 seconds.  Upon arrival in the corner, a couple of more hair-raising, chill-you-to-the-bones yells came from Barbara while she was dancing a jig on the couch.

While all of this was going on, I did not have a clue as to what was happening or what had caused Barbara to levitate from the area of our conversation to the coffee table to the couch and cutting the rug while loud, piercing, screams were pouring forth from her mouth. All the while, unbeknownst to me, the mouse was still on the move.  In a reflex reaction to Barbara’s screams and antics, I started to move myself because I knew something was going on, I was just not sure what.  That is when fate took over.

As I took a step to move toward where Barbara was up on the couch, the mouse ran right under my large size 12 foot.  I did not see him or even know that he was there. He just happened to be there, by a stroke of seriously bad luck, when my foot, with all 275+ pounds that I weighed at the time attached to it came back to the floor.

When my foot came down, I felt this little crunch under it and lifted my foot up.  There he was! DRT!!!  Dead right there!  I have often heard that mice could flatten themselves out when trying to escape.  Well, this one was flat alright!  Just not by his own doing.  All the while, Barbara was still letting out those high pitched screams and dancing a jig on my couch.

When she saw what had happened, she ceased dancing the jig and came down off the couch to check the situation out a little closer.  She recognized right quick the cause of her angst was no longer a threat.  He was, as they might say at the funeral home, gone to that great mouse land in the sky.

Well, when we had time to catch our breath a little, we began to laugh at the whole situation. From the time that Barbara first spotted the mouse until the time that he was DRT, it could not have lasted more than 10 seconds or so, maybe less. The execution, if that is what you would call it, was not a long, drawn out affair.

We shared the story of the great mouse encounter with folks around the school and we all had a good laugh about it for the remainder of the day. When I left the job as the principal at Holmes County High School a year or more later, there was still this little brown stain in the carpet at the scene of this “mouse meets his maker” incident.  Just looking at it from time to time reminded me of the hilarity of this brief encounter between the mouse, Barbara and me.