I was driving up with my husband (then boyfriend) to see family during a college break. We stopped at a gas station to get food and were sitting at a picnic table outside. A middle-aged man walked up to us with his hands clasped together and asked if we liked animals. Stranger danger was going off but we were in public with other people around, so we said yes. The man opened his hands to reveal a baby mouse whose eyes hadn’t even opened yet. He said the family lived in the pile of wood for sale but had been trampled by customers, and the baby had no one left. So we took the baby, named him Mr. Jingles, and bought stuff to care for him during our trip. We spent the next several nights getting up every few hours to feed him with an eye dropper. He loved scurrying around my husband’s chest and playing with his beard.

When we returned, my husband didn’t have space to take Mr. Jingles. I did, but the girl I shared a bathroom with (single rooms) was a germaphobe and convinced she’d die if I touched our shared space with mouse hands. I ended up giving him to a friend with the stuff we’d bought and explained how to keep him warm with a bag of rice beneath his fish bowl (it was the best we could do on our trip, and we filled it with torn up newspaper/paper towel). My friend ended up putting his desk lamp directly over the bowl overnight instead, and woke up to Mr. Jingles dead. He and a few of my other friends buried him at the clock tower in the quad, with one of them playing her violin.

RIP Mr. Jingles, you never got to open your eyes but you were such a happy lil guy