So a bomb blew up in downtown Nashville early on Christmas morning, near the AT&T building that’s also known as “The Batman Building” because, well, if you see it you’ll understand. It’s a feature of the Nashville skyline and although I can’t see it from where the building where I work–or rather where I worked until last March when everything shut down, and where I’ll eventually go back to work sometime in the coming year–I could go to the roof of the parking garage next door to where I work and see The Batman Building from there. For all that Nashville has grown and is still growing it’s still got a fairly compact downtown area, easy to get to and, in normal times, easy to walk around in if you don’t mind the crowds. Needless to say these aren’t normal times and when the bomb went off a lot of people just sighed resignedly and said, “Thanks for one more thing, 2020.” Although why the bomb in an RV was sent off downtown is still a mystery at least it went off early on Christmas morning when not many people were out and about–and it even made an announcement that it was a bomb and that people should get out of the area. For all the damage it did to the surrounding businesses, and as much as it would have been better if it hadn’t gone off at all, at least there’s a bright side. It’s also interesting to me that Nashville made it to the front of The New York Times, which we still get in actual print, delivered to our driveway, on the weekends, the day after Christmas because of the bombing and also on Christmas Day because photographer Ruth Fremson made a trip across the United States to document the way various cities around the country were celebrating the season in these not so normal times.
The New York Times, December 25th, 2020. Nashville is the city with the Grinch.
The New York Times, December 26th, 2020. Below the fold but still on the front page.
That reminded me of when I was a kid and I’d been with my parents to the Tennessee Performing Arts Center downtown to see, of all things, CATS. As we were coming out we heard a woman say, “You know, this town reminds me of New York thirty years ago.” My mother groaned and said, “Oh please no,” and about twenty-five years later when my father retired my parents moved to Florida which is the most New York thing they could possibly do, but that’s another story. One of the down sides of the bombing is because it affected the AT&T building it’s left a lot of people not just in Nashville but even in Tennessee and Kentucky without internet access. It’s left a lot of people, in other words, disconnected at a time when they want and need to be connected. It’s only temporary but here’s hoping it can all be restored before the end of the month–here’s hoping people will have a chance to say, thanks for bringing us back together, 2020.
This is not Boxing Day. It probably is if you’re in Britain and since the British invented it I guess they can say when it is and when it isn’t, although the British don’t get everything right, but that’s another story.
Traditionally Boxing Day has been the day after Christmas and the name may come from the tradition of putting out an alms box, or it may come from the tradition of giving postal workers and other messengers a Christmas gift since even they get a break on the 25th, although postal workers come around so regularly it seems to me it shouldn’t be that hard to give them something before Christmas and not some post-holiday leftovers that were probably gonna be thrown out anyway. When I was a kid I’d run across references to Boxing Day in things I read and assumed it was the day everyone boxed up their decorations. For some of us on the distaff side of the pond there’s a superstition that Christmas trees and other decorations have to come down before New Year’s Day, although then they miss the revelries of Twelfth Night, but that really is another story.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which the British also invented, in a small town where they’d ford their oxen which now has me wondering if the plural of boxes should be “boxen”, Boxing Day is the first weekday after Christmas—which means technically we’ve still got the weekend.
Source: gfycat
Anyway here are some random graffiti pictures that I took last year that I’ve never been able to figure out how to use so this seemed liked a good time to for unboxen.
One of our Christmas Eve traditions is that I make Eggs Benedict for my wife. It’s fun and fairly easy and not named after either Benedict Arnold or the Jeffersons’ British neighbor so I’m going to share the recipe here for anyone else who’d also like to give it a try. This recipe serves three, or six people if you’re serving it with a side dish, or one person if they’re really hungry and are trying to send their cholesterol level off the charts.
You will need:
About three billion eggs, or maybe only a dozen
A pound of butter (or two eight ounce sticks) at room temperature
Six tablespoons of lemon juice
Three English muffins
First halve and toast the English muffins. Classic Eggs Benedict calls for a slice of Canadian bacon, or, as the Canadians call it, “ham”, on the English muffin halves, but for some that may be too much. Tasty alternatives include slices of avocado or smoked salmon.
Poach six eggs. If you have an egg poacher you can use that. I’ve also poached the eggs by adding water and a small amount of vinegar to a shallow pan, but that’s tricky because you have to keep the water just below boiling. Place an egg on each of the English muffin halves.
You can now set this aside in a warm oven.
The Hollandaise sauce is the hard part, but it comes together quickly. First separate the yolks from the whites or, to be more accurate, from the clears. It’s okay to leave some of the clear with the yolks. Since this version of Hollandaise sauce is basically a savory lemon custard some albumen will help it hold together.
Combine the egg yolks and the lemon juice in a pan over low heat.
Add half the butter. Stir slowly.
Once the butter is melted continue stirring for about a minute then add the second half of the butter. Stir vigorously. At this point the eggs will start to cook and the sauce will thicken. This is when you have to work fast. Just after the butter is completely melted the sauce is culinary nitroglycerine. It won’t blow up but it is seriously unstable. Get it off the heat and evenly distribute it over the English muffin halves and poached eggs.
For some color sprinkle on a little paprika or some parsley or both for a seasonal red and green effect.
There’s been some talk that because so many kids are learning virtually the snow day would become a thing of the past because of course there has to be one more reason for 2020 to suck. That reminds me of one year when I was in college and we got what seemed like three feet of snow. Evansville is a pretty small town and the University of Evansville has a pretty small campus with everything within easy walking distance of everything else, and most of the professors lived within just a few blocks of campus. In fact that year I was living in a professor’s house with three other students while the professor was overseas, and when he found out we were using his house he was pretty mad, but that’s another story. Anyway we had an easy walk to campus and shared a backyard with another professor. So when we got all the snow I said, “What are they gonna do? Cancel classes?”
They cancelled all classes for three days.
There was also the time I was in my final exam right before Christmas break and it started snowing. Then it turned into a blizzard. I could hear people who’d finished all their exams outside screaming and laughing and having a great time. Snowballs were sailing past the windows and sometimes hitting the windows, and when I got my exam back after the break the professor had written, “Your answers to the final questions were disappointingly cursory,” because he’d forgotten what it was like to be a kid. Or even a young adult who still took joy in snow. Getting snow right as the break was about to start was almost as bad as getting snow over the break when we were already out of school.
Growing up in Tennessee of course school days were a rare treat because we rarely get snow, which is why pretty much any sign of it would shut down school, and sometimes when we were sitting in class all being very quiet some jerk in the back would get a laugh by yelling, “It’s snowing!” and we’d all turn around and look before we remembered it was May.
So it’s my birthday and I decided to start celebrating a little early by opening a bottle of port wine a friend of my parents gave them to mark the annus mirabilis, and which they gave to me when they moved to Florida because some wines improve with age and this one had a recommended shelf life of at least fifty years, and there was also a hope that I’d improve with age because for a while there it seemed like I couldn’t get any worse, but that’s another story.
No one knows who first got the idea of aging wine but it’s pretty easy to reverse-engineer where the idea probably came from: someone set aside or forgot a few bottles of a particular vintage then pulled them out some time later and discovered it tasted even better, or they pulled the wine out a really long time later and that’s how vinegar was invented. There have even been some cases of people drinking really, really old wine. Jacques Cousteau, my childhood hero, because I was a weird kid, and his crew found some wine in a Greek shipwreck that dated from around 230 BC and decided to drink it because of course that’s what you do and said it was “very sweet”. And in 2010 a bunch of champagne bottles were found off the coasts of Finland and Sweden and the divers drank some of it it because of course that’s what you do and said it was “pretty good”. Scientists also found 170-year old beer in a shipwreck and tried it because why not and said it was “terrible” because beer might improve with age but not if seawater gets into it.
The port wine I had was, for many years, stored in a narrow crawlspace behind the basement wall—the sort of thing that, under other circumstances, might have been forgotten and discovered years later by the next homeowner, or lost at sea and recovered centuries later if our house had been a ship, but it was where we went during several tornadoes and where some old paint cans and I think potatoes were stored. And then I kept it in the basement where my wife and I live now and it’s a pretty small basement so I’d see it pretty regularly as the years ticked by.
Opening it was a little intimidating. It’s marking a transitional period, and I probably could have aged it longer, but I thought it was time to move on. And I also had some other beverages handy in case it turned out 1970 was a good year for salad dressing. Maybe this is a good sign, though. It was smooth and pleasantly sweet and extremely good and worth waiting almost a halfcentury.
Maybe I’ll get anotherbottle for the next fifty years.
Christmas is generally a pretty jolly holiday but it wasn’t that long ago that it was a time for spooky stories told around the fire, which makes sense. Historically when Christmas came around it was cold, dark, and everybody had to stay inside, so it’s nice to know some things haven’t changed. And a lot of seasonal traditions come from pagan celebrations of the solstice,and while most of the pagans I know aren’t scary people the gradually diminishing daylight as we approach the shortest day of the year. The ghosts in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol are part of a long tradition, one that also gets a nod in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas In Wales when he says, “Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver,” and for me no Christmas is complete without Scrooged. Doctor Who even got into the act with several Christmas specials culminating in Voyage Of The Damnedin 2007 and the joke that everybody but the Queen was getting out of London until the holiday was over.
When I was a student in England Halloween was barely acknowledged, but at Christmas we had a costume ball, which was apparently more traditional, and I think we should embrace that on this side of the pond if it means two times a year when we can dress up and tell scary stories.
So I have a problem with rejection. I don’t even like to get the turndown service at hotels. And most of the time it’s not a problem, but, being a writer, rejection is part of the job. I knew it back when I was a college English majors and all my aspiring writer friends and I assured each other that part of the process was we’d be able to wallpaper our rooms with rejection slips before we ever saw an acceptance. We heard it from established writers too—even professionals sometimes get turned down. Accepting something like that intellectually is very different from accepting it emotionally, though, which is why for a long time I was reluctant to submit work anywhere unless I’d worked and reworked it, sometimes until the original spirit of inspiration that prompted it in the first place had completely dried up, leaving something that, even if it were technically good, was lifeless—like a photocopy of a reproduction of a picture of a dried flower.
The rejections that inevitably followed would send me down an emotional whirlpool, and I’d think, that’s it, I should just quit, it’s not like anyone’s asking me to write anyway, but then that’s the trouble. I didn’t start writing, and I don’t keep doing it, because I’m being asked to. It’s a compulsion. And when I’d seriously think about quitting I’d suddenly be flooded with ideas that I felt compelled to get down because that’s what happens when you taunt the Muse. In fact the most powerful Muse of all was and still is Ironia, who was expelled from the pantheon for using a sheep’s bladder to invent the first whoopee cushion, and who, upon departing, placed a curse on the other Muses that they would never get the joke.
In the final, fading days of 2019, I made a resolution that I’d get over my dislike of rejection, or at least mitigate it, by sending work out and getting it rejected. Intellectually I’ve known I needed to do this for a long time. I’m in a local writing group and when we’re doing introductions I’ll sometimes say, “I haven’t published much but I do have a nice stack of rejections,” which was, for a long time, only partly true. I did have some rejections but not enough to qualify as a “stack”, even if I printed them—one thing that’s changed since my college days is submissions and their responses, whether affirmative or negative, are sent electronically so I can’t wallpaper a room with them, which is probably just as well because electrons don’t go with the rest of the house’s décor.
So my plan for 2020, even before any of us knew what kind of year it was going to be, was to submit at least one new piece once a month, to get over, or at least mitigate, my dislike of rejection, to build up a tolerance for it. And I’ve managed to do a bit better and ended up with about fifteen, including an offer to teach a class on flash fiction, which I count as the only acceptance so far, although some things are still pending. There’s a big difference between accepting that the waiting is the hardest part emotionally and knowing intellectually that it’s not just a Tom Petty song, but that’s another story. And doing all this submitting has been an educational experience.
While rejections still aren’t fun I’ve realized I really like submitting. It helps give my writing focus and even purpose. Before I could and would tinker with a story or even a poem for years, sometimes cutting, more often adding, and sometimes would end up with an unwieldy epic. Admittedly, I’m not in bad company there; no one can forget the time Pope Julius II said to Michelangelo, “When I asked you to paint the ceiling I meant blue.” Any deadlines may be arbitrary and self-imposed but they force me to get to a stopping point and accept that, for some things at least, I’ve gotten to a point where they’re as good as they’re going to be and anything else is gilding the lily or, if I kept at it, encasing the lily in a solid block.
I’ve also learned that, for me, rejections are easier to take if they’re quick. A local weekly used to have an annual writing contest and I’d always enter and always lose but I’d go to the awards ceremony and three years in a row I’d start talking to one of the editors. He’d recognize my name and tell me how much he liked my work and I’d thank him politely while seething inside, thinking, if you liked it so much you should have put a ring on it, or at least published a list of runners-up. I’ve gotten some rejections that went into great detail about what they found wrong with my work, and while I appreciate the time and effort put into telling me the plot didn’t work, the characters were shallow, there was a typo seven-eighths of the way down page three, I need to trim my nose hair, that dress looks like I pulled it off a thrift store discount rack, and that I should put down the milkshakes and spend some time on a treadmill I’m capable of seeing the warts in my own work. I don’t want to tell editors how to do their job—if I did I’d tell them “Publish my work and give me some money!”–a simple “Thanks but no thanks” holds at least a flicker of hope. It allows me to imagine that the subtext may be, “We’d say yes but we’re full up. Try the place across the street!”
And submitting a lot does make the waiting easier. Instead of sweating and fretting over one thing as I wait for a response I get to sweat and fret over half a dozen things as I wait for a response, which is somehow easier and makes me wish Tom Petty were still around so I could tell him to try it. It also gives me some things I can put on my curriculum vitae, or will if I get any acceptances. It’s also prompted me to stick my neck, or at least my work, out more—I’m even sharing more with the local writing group I’m a part of, which may be why a couple of other members contacted me earlier this month. They’re starting a literary magazine and they wondered if I had a story they could use. Oh, hey, someone’s actually asked me to write for them, and they gave me a deadline that wasn’t arbitrary or self-imposed and I got back to them a few days early. Now I’m still waiting for a response but I hope they’ll say yes. If they don’t, well, maybe they know a place across the street.
One of the things I’ve missed about not taking the bus this year, specifically this season, is seeing the decorations. I’ve missed my afternoon commute getting darker as the days get shorter but brightened with the lights that decorate houses and shops along the way. Most years my wife and I will also drive around the neighborhood to see how houses we pass by without a thought most of the year are decorated, taking on a new distinctiveness. There’s at least one house we used to go by on our way to work each morning that had both a giant inflatable Santa and an inflatable Hanukkah Bear, and it always made me smile even though I had another day at work ahead of me, but that’s another story.
Some years too we’ve driven out to the country to see the Geminids. It was too cloudy this year but I knew they were still there, and most nights I can look to the East and see Jupiter and Saturn getting closer and closer to conjunction, something that hasn’t happened in almost four centuries, and a reminder that even when we’re staying still the world under our feet and the universe we’re part of keeps moving.
This year especially these traditions hold out the hope that next year will be better.
“All right, everybody get in formation!” Santa barked. The reindeer lined up dutifully.
“I’ve heard some grumblings in the herd,” Santa went on, “and I just want to say that anybody who doesn’t like it can go live with the Lapps.”
The reindeer pawed the ground and looked at each other nervously. Blitzen, who all of them knew as the smartass of the group, had mouthed off the last time Santa made the same suggestion. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll go live with the Lapps. Compared to this place it’ll be the Lapp of luxury!”
Mrs. Claus had taken him by the bridle and led him off behind the secondary workshop, the one with the heavy equipment. Later that night Donner peeked in the Claus’s window and thought he saw a crown roast being served.
“Now,” said Santa, “this is going to be a tough night. We’ve got fog right down to the deck every place east of the Rockies. Damn climate change. Vixen, you’ll take the lead ahead of Dasher and Dancer from the west coast. Prancer, you’ll take over after that until we get to Chicago.”
“It’s not gonna work, fat boy!” came a voice from the back of the herd.
“Who said that?” Santa yelled. “Nobody talks to me that way! Come on, step up or you’ll all be venison!”
The herd parted but one reindeer, smaller than the rest, with a distinct red nose, stood at the back.
“It was me, old man, and you’d better watch what you say because I’m your best hope.”
Santa narrowed his eyes. “Pretty full of yourself, aren’t you? Think you can get away with being so rude, Dolph? Maybe it’s time for you to—”
“What?” Dolph shot back. “Go live with the Lapps? Maybe you’d just send me back to Chernobyl where you found me.” The reindeer looked around. “Oh, I know you all know. I hear the jokes, the snickers, all the names you call me behind my back. That I’m the Radioactive Russian, the Solar Siberian, the Toxin of the Tundra. Well check this out.” He wrinkled his forehead and his nose began to glow a bright piercing red.
Santa glared for a moment then threw back his head and laughed. “Ho ho ho! That’s a pretty neat trick therem sonny. You know I run a tight ship but every captain knows you don’t put a navigator in the bilge. You can lead the second string.”
“Nothing doing.” Dolph pawed the ground. “I don’t want a piece of the action. You need me to lead the team the whole way.”
“Nobody’s made the whole round trip,” said Santa, “not in a long time. Not since, well, Flossie and Glossie led the team. You think you can handle it?”
“Handle it?” Dolph stepped forward. “You bet your wide load I can handle it. I’m going down in history.”
“All right,” Santa said, “let’s get harnessed up.” Then he turned to Mrs. Claus and muttered, “The kid probably’d taste terrible anyway.”
This is a revised version of an essay originally titled “Live And Let Live” I offer each year on the first night of Hanukkah.
The squirrels have stayed out of the attic. At the start of every Hanukkah I think about this because several years ago we had a squirrel infestation. There was at least one family nesting in the insulation. The scrabbling sounds that woke us up in the middle of the night were a minor inconvenience, as was the possibility the squirrels were using whatever we had stored up there for nesting material. A bigger problem was that they might be tearing up the insulation, as was the possibility that they might chew through wiring which could start a fire and burn down the entire house, leaving all of us without a nest, and unlike the squirrels we couldn’t easily move to a clump of leaves in the nook of a tree. So I unfolded the rickety wooden ladder and climbed into the attic through the door in the hallway ceiling. I was able to chase some squirrels out but that was a temporary solution so I also took some traps smeared with peanut butter. I used the spring bar traps, the kind that used to be sold under the slogan, “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Since we were dealing with squirrels, though, I used the size intended for bigger animals. These had the slogan, “These will cut your fingers off,” and could be sprung from ten feet away by a good sneeze. I discovered dexterity I never knew I had and set the traps carefully, hoping they’d serve as a deterrent and convince the squirrels to move out. I wasn’t so lucky. I had to bag a few bodies, their necks broken by the steel bar, and carry them to the garbage then reset the traps, trying not to sneeze. Then one night I found a squirrel still alive in one of the traps. It was struggling to get away but badly injured. I knew I couldn’t let the squirrel go. Even if it survived its injury, which wasn’t likely, even if it avoided being run over by a car, even if it escaped neighborhood dogs, stray cats, coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, even if it wasn’t attacked by other squirrels, it could get back into the house. And it would spend whatever life it had left in excruciating pain. I’d caused it to suffer and I had a responsibility to end that suffering. I knew all this, but I wasn’t looking forward to what I had to do either. My wife suggested I use a hatchet but that would mean I’d have to look at the squirrel, I’d have to aim carefully, and I wasn’t prepared to do that. A history teacher once told me that Mary Queen of Scots, as she approached the chopping block, turned to her executioner and said, “Be mercifully quick.” Her request apparently made him lose his nerve; it took him three tries to finish the job.I put the trap with the squirrel still in it into a white plastic garbage bag and took it out to the driveway. I got a shovel out of the basement. The squirrel struggled a little in the bag, which I appreciated because it told me exactly where to hit. I wanted, for both of us, to be mercifully quick. After the clang of the shovel faded, I heard a flute playing. Someone a few houses away was in their backyard practicing “Jingle Bells”. For some reason this song always makes me think of people and woodland animals sharing the sleigh ride together, a sort of Eden with snow and blinking lights. The sun had just set, and in the stillness I realized that in some houses and places of worship the first candle of the menorah had either been lit or was about to be lit. I’m not Jewish. I’m not even religious in any traditional sense, but I know Hanukkah is a holiday that celebrates hope and perseverance. It’s about a miracle of light and life–one day’s worth of oil burning for eight–coming to people who have just been through darkness and death. It’s a celebration by people who survived an all-out attempt to wipe them off the face of the Earth. It may not be the highest of holy days but it’s usually celebrated around the solstice, and there’s something fitting, even poetic, about candles being lit against the darkness on the darkest nights of the year. I first learned about Hanukkah when I was a Boy Scout and working on a project about religion. I was supposed to learn about a faith other than my own. I was raised in a very relaxed Presbyterian church and because I wasn’t particularly religious then either I could have picked just about any other Christian sect and had friends who were Catholic and Baptist and Methodist, but I didn’t know any Jews. I’d read stories about Jewish families and traditions. The minister of our church had a sign on his office door that said, “Shalom!” I decided I wanted to know Judaism better. I went to a local temple one afternoon when it was empty. First the rabbi took me to his office and started asking me questions. How long had I been a Boy Scout? What was my project about? Why had I chosen Judaism? It was nice to have an adult take an interest in me but also confusing. I knew “rabbi” was the Hebrew word for “teacher” and I was there to learn, not talk about myself. When he asked if I knew anything about Judaism I panicked. I should have done some cursory background reading before coming, I thought, but I hadn’t done anything to prepare. I admitted this and prepared myself for his disappointment. Instead he smiled. “There’s no sin in ignorance.” Suddenly I felt relief. I’m sure adults had told me that before, but it was not what I expected, especially from a teacher. I spent most of my youth feeling like I was supposed to know things that I’d never been told; everything seemed to be a test, and I frequently thought I was failing. At that moment I felt assured that it was okay to not know anything as long as I was willing to learn. “Do you know any Jewish holidays?” he asked. Since I’d learned about Passover in Sunday school I didn’t think of it as a Jewish holiday. Instead I said, “Hanukkah,” which I knew sometimes overlapped with Christmas. “Do you know the story of Hanukkah?” I still didn’t feel great about not knowing anything, but he smiled again and told me the story of the Maccabees, and the destruction of the temple, and how the oil that was only supposed to last for one night burned for eight, and Hanukkah is the celebration of this miracle. Then he took me into the main sanctuary and showed me around. It was very much like other churches I’d been in, very much like the Presbyterian sanctuary I went to every Sunday, in fact, with pews and a raised section at the front, but with slightly different decorations. He explained about the Torah, how the ark that holds it is positioned so those who face it are facing toward Jerusalem. Then he pointed upward to the Eternal Light. It was just an electric light, made to look like a flickering flame, but the specifics didn’t concern me. I was captivated by the symbolism. I had only a vague idea of how unkind history, particularly the 20th Century, had been to the Jews but here, I thought, was the central symbol of a belief system built around hope. In college I took a class on Judaism, and attended services at the local synagogue. The first time I went I picked up a prayer book and opened it. On the first page there was a short story about the prophet Isaiah, who stood at the door of the temple and said, “I cannot go in, this temple is full.” The people looked in and said, “There’s no one in the temple. Why do you say it’s full?” And Isaiah said, “The temple is filled with prayers that are not sincere. Only prayers offered from the heart will ascend into Heaven.” Again I felt that deep sense of hope. Faith, the ultimate expression of hope, is worthless if it’s not sincere. I went to services at the temple several more times, and took part in Passover seders in the spring, and, with a friend, lit the menorah candles for Hanukkah. One day while I was doing research for a paper in the synagogue library I sat in on a talk the rabbi gave parents about coping with, and hopefully preventing, teen suicides. He was emphatic that “l’chaim”, “to life”, wasn’t just a toast made at meals but a philosophy, that to be a Jew meant taking joy in life. In my studies of Judaism I kept going back to Hanukkah and its traditions. I read how, over a thousand years ago, two rabbis, Shammai and Hillel, had competing ideas about how Hanukkah should be celebrated. Rabbi Shammai said all candles should be lit on the first night and then one extinguished on each night as a literal representation of the diminishing oil. There’s a strange beauty in Shammai’s literalness, and I assume the growing darkness would end with a grand blaze. Rabbi Hillel said that one candle should be lit each night so on the final night all eight candles would blaze with glory. Instead of increasing darkness there would be growing light and hope. Hillel’s tradition is the one that’s survived. None of this has anything to do with the squirrels, but it all came to me anyway. I was extinguishing a light even as in other houses flames were being offered up against the darkness. It seemed like the universe was conspiring to make me feel bad about what I’d done, but I accepted the responsibility. I’d even say I welcomed it, even if I wished the epiphany had come more easily. I can rationalize until I’m blue in the face. I can say that even though one-fourth of all mammal species are presently in danger of extinction squirrels aren’t one of them. I can say that at least I’m not actually harming another person, and that through history people have done terrible things to other people with less justification than I have for killing the squirrels in the attic. Nothing I can say changes the fact that, hokey as it sounds, I don’t want to be directly responsible for the deaths of squirrels. I don’t think squirrels are a cornerstone species, or that the disappearance of Sciurus griseus would tip the balance and lead to the extinction of Homo sapiens, but being too casual about extermination threatens us all. As long as the traps were killing them I could shirk responsibility. I was just a caretaker; the traps were doing the work. When the trap failed, I had to face what I was doing. I thought about a poem by Maxine Kumin, who was Jewish, called “Woodchucks”, about her efforts to protect her vegetable garden. She opens with a quick description of first using gas, “The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange/was featured as merciful, quick at the bone,” but it doesn’t work and over the poem’s thirty lines she quickly escalates to shooting them, “The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling/to the feel of the .22.” One woodchuck evades her and in the end she laments, “If only they’d all consented to die unseen/gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” This is the danger that comes from being too casual about death. She feels herself becoming her own worst enemy. It’s not a perfect metaphor. The only perfect metaphor that I know of in English literature is from Gertrude Stein, also Jewish, who wrote, “a rose is a rose is a rose”. There is no justification for the Nazi concentration camps. The woodchucks, on the other hand, threatened Kumin’s food supply, or at least her rhubarb and brussels sprouts. The Biblical land of milk and honey is called that because, in theory anyway, called that because nothing has to die to provide them, but we can’t live on milk and honey alone. Part of the web of life is death. As a counter to that I also thought of a poem by Gerald Stern, also also Jewish, called “Behaving Like A Jew”, about finding an opossum shot and lying in the road. He says, “I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death./I am going to behave like a Jew/and touch his face, and stare into his eyes.” What exactly he does next isn’t clear, other then moving the opossum off the road, but what is clear is that he refuses to let a death pass; he is going to mourn the loss of a life so small and seemingly unconnected to his. I didn’t reset the trap in the attic that night, or again. Something in me had broken, but in another strange coincidence the squirrels left and didn’t come back. There were still a few traps up there at either end of the attic, where I’d balanced carefully on the rafters and tried to avoid stepping through the insulation, but they stayed empty. Maybe the injured squirrel had frightened the others away. Maybe it was just a coincidence. If I were religious I might believe they knew I’d prayed for the killing to stop and that because my prayer was sincere it rose up.
This is a revised version of an essay originally titled 