Last night I, once again, barged into my kitchen unannounced—calling ahead prior to changing locations within my own abode is a habit I have yet to adopt—and in so doing I rudely interrupted a cute little mouse during its preliminary inspection of a piece of pie which had been left unattended on the counter.

Although I cat scant resemblance to a bear … let’s try this again … although I bear scant resemblance to a cat and, to the best of my recollection, neither meowed, hissed, purred, nor licked myself on entrance, poor little Mickey or Minnie panicked as he or she noticed my presence, turned tail, performed an obvious miscalculation with respect to brake speed and counter friction, tumbled over the counter’s edge, landed on his or her spine on the tile floor beneath, instantly bounced back on his or her four little feet, and zipped into the sunset—under the fridge, to be precise—never to be seen again.

The trespassing quadruped, I would guesstimate, measured roughly three inches in length if it were to stand on its hind legs. My kitchen counter is exactly 36 inches high—a mensuration I performed for the purpose of composing this official report (using measuring tape, not Tampax, although the term may understandably precipitate split-second confusion in the precipitate reader)—which works out to approximately twelve times the height of the rodent (whom, alas, I’d had no opportunity to mensurate, so my uneducated non-veterinarian approximation will have to do).

As per my passports, I am six foot tall. (Regarding the plural, I suppose it should be feet, but since congenital Americans, for whatever reason, keep saying foot even when referring to more than one such unit of length, I have reluctantly resolved to bow to local convention lest I be chided for mulish refusal to assimilate.) Although I’ve never performed the experiment and have no plans to volunteer—at least not until Obamacare kicks in and turning one’s skeleton into sawdust has become an affordable venture—I would guess that if I plunged a distance of twelve times my height, i.e., a distance of 72 feet, which amounts to several stories (floors, not tales), and hit an unyielding surface back first, I would not spryly leap back on my feet and zip anywhere anytime soon.

Thus I conclude, with as scientific a reasoning as I can muster based on my observed datum, that mice are made of whatever gummi bears are made of.