From The Pagan Science Monitor
It all started innocently enough — when he was living in Miami shortly before Y2K, someone asked Eric Francis if he wanted to adopt a mouse. A family had just acquired a cat and the two were not going to mix. The mouse was cute, gray and wiggled his whiskers. He named the mouse Jonathan. He came with a yellow Habitrail.
“I don’t know, it seemed karmic,” Mr. Francis said at the time, in a Miami Herald interview.
“It was one of those moments where you know your life has just changed.” He was living in the Dunes Beach Club, a would-be, has-been hotel and casino populated by Miami’s most elite snowbirds and transients. Planet Waves was just over a year old, but he had already acquired worldwide following of people who clung to his every typo.
“I bonded with Jonathan,” Mr. Francis said. “As I got to know him, he seemed more human. There was something unusual about him. He fit in my pocket and weighed 22 grams. On the astral plane he was a giant. And as I got to know him, I began to acquire his tendencies.”
For example, Mr. Francis began to enter buildings through the basement, then come up to the first floor. When eating in a restaurant, he would always sit quietly in the corner and munch unobtrusively.
He began giving talks at local New Age bookstores, and was getting $100 each for channeling sessions. “He was in contact with what he called the Muse Musculus, the part of the soul that is eternally one with the Mouse,” said Florence Dickens, owner of Sagittarius Rising Books.