Rats!!

"Today Anne-Marie asked if we were having rats for dinner," my  son put on Facebook.  It turned out he had mentioned earlier that they might have "wraps" for supper.

Upon reading his post, a friend remarked that 6-year-old Anne-Marie had told her on a park outing that morning that they were having rats for supper!  She realized my granddaughter had misunderstood, of course, and joked with her about it.

It made me think of a story of an earlier day and time that my dad used to tell.  When he was only two years old, his father abandoned the family, leaving my grandmother with 5 children to raise alone.  Besides the economic struggle, she became seriously ill and had to resort to placing the three older children--my dad and his brother, who were probably 9 and 10 years old by this time, and a young teen sister--in an orphanage.

The teen-aged sister, a beautiful girl, was adopted by a wealthy couple.  (The man eventually divorced his wife and married her, although she was unhappy and the marriage didn't last.)  Meanwhile, my dad and his brother ran away from the orphanage and cooked a rat once and ate it!

He said one day they knocked on a door wanting food and pretended to be deaf and mute, rubbing their stomachs and motioning that they were hungry.  The housewife who answered the door turned to the younger boy and said, "What about you, honey? Are you deaf and dumb, too?"  to which he answered, "Yes, ma'am."  Shades of Tom Sawyer!

When I opened my Bible today, the selected reading was I Samuel 5:1-7:17, dealing with the ark of God being captured by the Philistines.  Everywhere the ark was placed in enemy territory, it brought destruction on the people.  At one point the people were plagued with rats and tumors.  In the notes in one of my Bibles, it said that the rats probably brought the bubonic plague, of which one of the symptoms is tumors in the lymph nodes.

Thankfully, due to the grace of God things have progressed beyond the hard times of the past, and knowledge prevents many diseases today.  Even the dreaded toxin that causes botulism is now used to take out wrinkles and beautify faces. Now if they would just find something good about rats!  But don't worry, sweet Anne-Marie, they won't be served for dinner!