Pack Rat King Even Tried to Collect Mice

Hanging onto junk has been a retirement plan of mine for quite some time. I'm not an idiot. It's not my only retirement plan. I also figure I could win the lottery (note to self: start buying lottery tickets) and I'm not ruling out improving my golf game and qualifying for the seniors' PGA tour. Seriously, I acknowledge that professional golfers are way better than us amateurs but if I had coaches and sports psychologists and custom-fitted equipment and hours and hours a day to practise without my wife yelling at me to come home for supper, I could easily get to the top five in world rankings. Top 10 at the worst.

But yeah, my collection of junk might be my best option if I want to retire in comfort. I have lots of good stuff. I have some Coke bottles with different sports team logos. I have Star Wars action figures and hockey cards and comic books.

A 10-cent comic book from 1938 - Action Comics, No. 1, which introduced Superman to the world, just sold at auction for just under $3.3 million. I don't have that one. But I have lots of other good titles in my collection. The only problem is they aren't quite as old or rare or sought after as Superman's debut. My best comic is probably a Married with Children, No. 1. I paid $1.95 for it in 1991 and I see it online selling for as much as $3.65 so, yeah, a pretty solid return. If only I had bought six million copies.

Sometimes I wonder if my family is right, if I am too much of a pack rat. I do have a cardboard box labelled "Historic Newspapers" featuring stories like Elvis's death and the Blue Jays winning the American League East pennant for the first time in 1985. These are historic moments for sure but is there any reason to hang on to yellowing old newspapers?

I did some cleaning in the garage last weekend and came across boxes of old books. Some were musty and getting a little mouldy and I questioned why I had them stored away in the first place. A paperback of Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson? This thing stuck with me through five different apartment and house moves and I still haven't read it. I threw it out. Well, I am going to throw it out. Honest.

I also checked up in the garage rafters. There is an old garage door opener box up there and it's been there since we moved into our current home seven years ago. I've never even looked at it. I went to take it down and realized it had some weight to it. I wondered if maybe it actually had a garage door opener in it. Or possibly a human head. Could be anything really.

I carefully pulled the box down and set it on the ground. What could be in it? I couldn't retire on a Craftsman garage door opener but hey, it would be kind of cool to find. I pulled back the flaps of the dusty old cardboard and inside I found a bunch of torn up paper. An animal, or family of animals and all its cousins, had set up an apartment. I looked a little deeper. The box was full of birdseed - at least five pounds of it or more.

I very gingerly poked around with a stick expecting something living to scurry out but the box appeared to be empty ... for now. With that much birdseed it looked like the mice were well prepared for the coming winter and the one after and so on until around 2027. That volume of seed compared to the size of a mouse would be like me living in an entire Trump Tower made of poutine.

I couldn't help but feel those mice worked hard on this project and I was a little reluctant to destroy all that effort. I considered putting the box back in the rafters and hoping the mice would happily live there and not pack up and move into my golf bag. But then I would be the ultimate pack rat, literally, collecting pack rats. I bagged it up and got rid of the mouse house.

Now I just hope the mice don't find my prized comic book collection. It ain't much but as I tell my family, in 50 or 60 years that Married with Children, No. 1 could be worth something.

Chuck Brown can be reached at