Precilla, Blossom, and Mistress Mouse

There’s big news in our house: the careful selection and late afternoon arrival of two much-anticipated gerbils as a back-to-school indulgence for my daughter Claire, who starts sixth grade on Monday. Precilla and Blossom are busily exploring the cardboard tubes and big yellow wheel of their new habitat, and as I write this Claire is supposedly asleep in the bed across the room from them, though it would not surprise me a bit if she were secretly peeking at them one more time.

Normally this rodent invasion would not be bike blog news, except for the coincidence that I ran across another rodent item today that is bike-related, one that unlocked a rush of childhood memories from some quarter of my brain sealed off at about age five and rarely accessed since.

If the image above clangs a bell in your memory as loudly as it does in mine, then you know I’m talking about the pig family, setting off in their orange convertible on a trip to the beach, in Richard Scarry’s 1975 classic Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. And it’s only a few pages into the book that the family encounters Officer Flossy on her classy red bike, chasing after all manner of traffic scofflaws.

While I absolutely love the idea of foxy Officer Flossy on her bicycle, tooting her whistle as she chases down the dangerous driving dingo, it may surprise you to learn that Flossy is not the subject of today’s post. No, today’s post is about rodents, remember? And the memorable rodent in Cars and Trucks and Things that Go is this little lady:

Mistress Mouse, up on the truck engine, is a tow truck driver who can “fix almost anything.” And she drives a super cute little pink tow truck (see it on the cover image, above?), which finally brings us to the visual punchline of today’s post, this amazing little eight second Vimeo glimpse of a girl whose loving father turned her trike into Mistress Mouse’s Tow Truck. It’s almost as cute as our new gerbils! (We want to see more of the Mistress Mouse Trike!)

Mistress Mouse from jeff hamada on Vimeo.

Officer Flossy is still chasing Dingo Dog, though! Can you spot him? Do you think she’ll ever catch him to give him that ticket? Faster, Flossy, faster!

All illustrations © Richard Scarry. Video found via booooooom.com