I like beans with ketchup

The first six or seven pages have taken me to my neighbourhood and I couldn't help comparing the relationship between Lennie and George and the one between Mike and me.

Mike too, if it had been worth it, would have brought a damn dead mouse as a pet if I hadn't been there to gut his hobby, because he came up with some special things from time to time.

What did they do at Weed? Why did they have to run away? Having agile legs helps anyone and anywhere; it is a heritage that must be preserved while one is alive, because nobody knows when one have to use them to get out of a jam, for using a sweet word.

On page nine I have already noticed that my good-time buddy behaved a little cranky many times, but it was temporary; while to the good of Lennie it seems that madness accompanies him twenty-four hours a day. I am about to think that what he really has is a mental illness that is used for the shrink to send you to a madhouse and from there don´t go out in life.

Just one hundred and twenty pages. A small book that you can easily cover between the middle finger and the thumb.

In the old days we were like that too ‘… because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you…’ Mike used to say when we stopped to talk about our future. That was before. Now I don't even know what happened to him. I don't know if he married, if he has children and grandchildren; I don't even know if he lives.

The first day ends when the sane friend promises the sick friend a farm with rabbits and chickens. Rabbits of all colours is what Lennie wants. Red, green, blue rabbits. And when George finishes naming the millions of rabbits of different colours, Lennie warns him that they also have to be hairy. Furry ones. Like the ones he saw at the Sacramento fair.

From my Borstal.

LDR

Of Mice and Men. John Steinbeck. Pocket Penguin Classic. London, 2006.