The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

In the original tale, a proud town mouse visits his cousin in the country. The country mouse offers the city mouse a meal of simple country cuisine, at which the visitor scoffs and invites the country mouse back to the city for a taste of the "fine life" and the two cousins dine like emperors. But their rich and delicious metropolitan feast is interrupted by a couple of dogs which force the rodent cousins to abandon their meal and scurry to safety. After this, the country mouse decides to return home, preferring security to opulence or, as the 13th-century preacher phrased it, "I'd rather gnaw a bean than be gnawed by continual fear".

This story has brought forth many variations, and I have mine.

My wife and I went to Toronto last weekend to visit my daughter in her new dorm apartment, bring her a couple of items, take her out to dinner and in the end, bring her home for a day.

She has been living there for a few weeks, and has become more and more sophisticated by living in the “big smoke”, at the "centre of the universe".

After spending time delivering a few things, we went off to dinner at the restaurant of her choosing, a Schezwan Chinese restaurant in the Younge and Dundas Square area. We wandered for a while on a Saturday evening, and I was amazed by the number of people out and about, and I will admit that I hadn’t seen that many people in one place since being in Times Square a few years ago. A whole host of humanity wandered by, and I was looking around. I noticed my daughter’s unhappiness, as usual, at my behavior. Clearly, my wife and I were the country mice and she was the city mouse, all slick and sophisticated.

Not sophisticated enough however to pick up the check, and therefore, of limited credibility.