The Gravity of the Situation

photo by Malgorzata Surawska

The dog is seriously not okay with the squirrels in this neighborhood. I get the feeling he thinks J and I don't fully appreciate the danger we’re all in. I have to admit that these squirrels do seem like they're up to something. A re-arrangement of our neighborhood's natural resources. They're taking nuts from over here and putting them over there. It's a massive undertaking. Ambitious in scale and scope. 

I looked it up. One oak tree can drop ten thousand acorns a year. There must be a dozen oak trees on my street alone. There's one in my front yard. It's dropping acorns right now. One every couple of minutes. They roll down the roof and into the gutter, then down the gutter and into the yard like some sort of unimpressive Rube Goldberg machine. 

The squirrels have their work cut out for them and they’re uniquely unqualified to do it. I read that squirrels forget where they bury 90% of their stash. They bury a nut, then immediately forget where they buried that nut. 

"Oh crap," they think. "Here we go again."

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I ran into my neighbor Curtis the other day. He was sweeping his front lawn with a broom. 

"Curtis, are you sweeping your front lawn with a broom?" I said. "Because that's what it looks like."

It was the acorns, he said. In the morning he goes out to get the paper and he's always stepping on acorns. It's painful. "Like stepping on Legos," he says. He's bagging them up and sending them off to the dump where they can't hurt anybody anymore. He's filled three bags already. He's working on bag number four.

"I hear you," I said, "but we can't go losing our heads out here. That's exactly what the acorns want us to do."

I saw a TED Talk where this guy said that over thousands of years trees manipulated humans into spreading their seeds across the planet. We did all the hard work for them. They made us think it was our idea.

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"Life, uh, finds a way," Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park. But I think what he means is: Life always finds a sucker.

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Back in the living room, the dog and I are pressing our faces against the window with our eyes the size of frisbees. The squirrels are at it again this morning. They don't seem to know what they're doing but they're doing it with the blind enthusiasm required to achieve any great undertaking. They just might pull it off, whatever it is. 

If you're not picky about the outcome, a lot of possibilities open up to you in terms of how to accomplish it.

 See: John Cage's stochastic discography

See: Evolutionary theory

See: The whole goddam universe for that matter

There is no method to this madness. 

Madness is the method.

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"I'll play it," Miles Davis said to Bob Weinstock before recording If I Were a Bell, "and tell you what it is later." 

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For a long time I didn't realize we even had an oak tree in our front yard. Apparently these things are really easy to overlook even when they're full grown, the size of a two story building. We'd been living here for months when our neighbor rang our doorbell and asked if she could hang her son's piñata from our tree. 

I said, "We have a tree?" 

By next year we should have ten thousand of them. 

The year after that: one hundred million.

That day I stood in my front yard with my new neighbor, watching kids in party hats whack the shit out of some rainbow-colored goat, the plastic-wrapped hard candies flying all over the place, catching the sun like stained glass. 

Later I started finding candy in the bushes. 

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Now in the mornings the dog and I get up early and sit at the window while J sleeps in the other room. She doesn’t fully appreciate the danger we’re all in. We try not to bother her with it. I drink coffee and play Miles Davis quietly out of my laptop speakers. The classics, mainly. The Birth of Cool. Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, featuring the upbeat Frank Loesser tune “If I Were a Bell,” which quickly became a Miles Davis classic. 

He played it, I think. But did he ever tell us what it was?

“It’s important to stay cool,” I remind the dog. “It’s important to stay relaxed.”

The squirrels are staying cool. They’re staying relaxed. They’re putting on weight and it’s going straight to their hips. By January they’re each twenty pounds, waddling around the yards with their arms full of acorns. They’re doing Curtis’s work for him. They’re moving the acorns from his yard into my yard. And they’re moving the acorns from my yard into his. The old switcheroo. They’re taking their time and really doing it right. 

This morning I swear I saw one heading over to Curtis’s with its arms full of Gobstoppers and a Jolly Rancher in its mouth.