Dr. Seuss cartoon, October 1941. Source: Snopes.com
When I was four years old I got lost at the shopping mall. I’ve written about this before but while history may not exactly repeat itself it often rhymes, and the present changes how we see the past. What happened is my mother was shopping for clothes and I was trying to make the sleeves of shirts and jackets talk and I also discovered that I could squeeze in between clothes on a circular rack and be completely surrounded by gray and navy jackets, and if I spun around and around I wouldn’t know where I came in, so when I came out I just sort of zigzagged off into the mall. What I distinctly remember, though, is that I was never scared. I understood what happened. I was concerned and definitely wanted to find my mother, and even when outside thinking she might be out there. And I thought maybe I could find her car and stand next to it, but I gave up on that when I realized I couldn’t remember where we’d parked. So I went back in and asked a woman who worked at the store if she could help me, and she let me sit behind a cash register while she called the store detective and he found my mother. As I said I was never scared. It was actually kind of exciting, and the calm way all the adults I spoke to acted and spoke to me without being condescending was reassuring. We might have just been hanging out together, and I think before my mother and I left I thanked them and added, “You must come and see us in Cape Cod this August.” And this wasn’t long after another big event in my life. We’d just moved to a new house, and that was exciting too. It wasn’t a dramatic move. My parents moved from a pretty nice house in one suburban Nashville neighborhood to another pretty nice, but much larger, house in another suburban Nashville neighborhood. I could be excited because my parents were happy to be moving, they wanted to move, and I understood that. It was an adventure. The first night in the new house I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of my new bedroom which seemed enormous without any furniture, and still seemed enormous after the bed and bookshelves were put in. The first time I went out to explore the backyard it was wild and overgrown with weeds and I put my bare foot in the middle of a thistle the size of Delaware because I was looking around and not down. Not long after we moved in my parents would clear away the weeds and one old tree, leaving behind a spindly oak that cast a strange shadow like heads swaying back and forth on my bedroom wall.
I can’t explain why but recent events made me think about moving to a new home, how easy it was. My parents were able to check out their new home before they decided to move. They weren’t worried about being welcome in the neighborhood. After all they’re white. So am I. When I got lost at the mall I was a minor but not a minority.
For a long time when I remembered that time I was lost I thought how lucky I was, but it was more than just luck, unless you count the . There were countless circumstances that gave me an advantage. The woman who worked at the mall had some strong words for my mother but that was the worst that happened.
When I see kids being taken from their families I can’t imagine what they’re going through. To even try I’d have to consider almost every aspect of my own experience and reverse it. What would it be like to have parents who had to leave difficult and uncertain circumstances in hopes of finding something better, to be taken away from those parents because of a new policy, to be locked in a cage.
It’s difficult to imagine how that would feel, but still easier than trying to understand why.
April is the cruelest month, and also National Poetry Month, or maybe it’s the cruelest month because it’s National Poetry Month. I started using poetry in high school. It started light: Poe, a little Shelley here and there, some Dickinson, but it wasn’t long before I was on to the hard stuff: Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Coleridge. I had a teacher who made us read The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams in class and then she spent the next fifty-nine minutes before the bell haranguing us about how this poem was full of deep, mystical symbolism and that we were all too young and uneducated to understand it. and this convinced a lot of my classmates to just say no to poetry, but not me. I was hooked and even became an English major in college and learned that what The Red Wheelbarrow is really about is a red wheelbarrow and some chickens.
Here are some poems I wrote in that previous life.
Ratopolis
“There’s a war going on in our cities…and the rats are winning.”
-from a commercial for a National Geographic special
Rats are winning the war for the city,
Displacing us as they come from below.
While our tactics are softened with pity
Rats are winning the war for the city.
Gassing a poisons aren’t pretty,
But all is fair in this war if we know
Rats are winning the war for the city,
Displacing us as they come from below.
Displacing us as they come from below
The rats teach us something we never knew
By steady process, since our brains are slow.
Displacing us as they come from below
The rats whisper to us we are rats too.
Knowing too much disrupts our status quo.
Displacing us as they come from below
The rats teach us something we never knew.
Paranoia
Headed toward home I wonder who monitors all the monitors
That glow in the houses on either side. And where
Are they? In the savannahs and remote jungles,
Where the only electricity comes from seasonal storms
Seen in photographs from a distance, monitors
Are lizards that slink around rocks and over
Trees after small mammals and other easy meals.
They range in size from smaller than your hand
To monsters with five-fingered feet
With claws that could slice off your leg,
And they’ve held dominion over their territory
From time before the first simians scraped sparks
Out of stones. A trespassing baron sat down to rest
Among them. All his minions found was his indigestible glasses
And shoes. Some of these big lizards, although common
Names are hard to pin down, are called basilisks.
In legend basilisks had the power to turn their prey,
Or anyone who caught their eye, no matter how
Casually, into stone. It’s just a legend. Some
Legends are encrusted or crystallized facts,
But not this one. This legend’s safely
In its cage around the next corner licking its lips.
I have a contract with the squirrels. They may not consider it legally binding but it should be understood by both of us that they’re supposed to stay out of my attic and not come in to make nests in the insulation and chew the rafters and wiring. Since I can’t retaliate by moving into their nests in the trees I reserve the right to set traps in the attic. A few years ago I woke up to squirrels or mice or used car salesmen or some other kind of vermin scrabbling around in the ceiling over my head. I set traps in the attic and whatever it was avoided the traps and went away. I like to think it or they saw the traps and said, “Holy mackerel, let’s move to some place safer like a nuclear reactor!” This is the way it should work. In December, though, a few dumb squirrels moved in and were holding cocktail parties well past midnight. I announced the terms of our agreement very loudly as I set out traps smeared with peanut butter. I didn’t really want to set the traps, primarily because that meant going up in the attic, which meant climbing that rickety wooden ladder. The ladder has two warnings on it. One, in huge print, says, “Failure to use ladder correctly could result in damage to the ladder!” As far as I can tell “failure to use ladder correctly” means dousing it with gasoline and setting it on fire. The other warning, in fine print, says, “Oh yeah, you might also hurt yourself, so please take off those stupid slippers and put on some real shoes.” But the real problem is I don’t like heights, or, to be more specific, landing at the bottom of them. I get the shakes when I stand on a chair. Once in the attic I’m fine because I’m on solid ground again, or at least solid plywood over that insulation that looks like cotton candy but tastes much better. It’s the climbing part that gets to me, especially since I have to use at least one hand to carry the traps. I use the spring bar traps, the kind that are sold under the slogan, “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door,” except I use the larger ones. The slogan for the large ones is: “These will cut your fingers off.” I could pride myself on being able to set these traps and position them with the steady hands of a neurosurgeon or bomb defuser, but there’s nothing good about any part of the job.
In her poem “Woodchucks” Maxine Kumin goes from killing the woodchucks with poison gas to picking them off with a gun. It ends with her saying there’s one woodchuck who eludes her, and she concludes, “If only they’d all consented to die unseen/gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” It’s not a perfect metaphor, although if it were it wouldn’t be a metaphor. The only perfect metaphor that I know of in English literature is, “a rose is a rose is a rose”. There was 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. Interspecies violence is, like it or not, part of nature, and often fundamental to survival. The squirrels don’t know this, of course, any more than Kumin’s woodchucks who saw her garden as an open buffet. When I set traps for the squirrels it wasn’t because of an irrational and unnecessary prejudice against them. It was because they could chew through an electric cord and burn the house down, which would mean we’d all be out of a place to live. And I hoped the squirrels would see the traps and leave. Unfortunately it didn’t work that way. I took several squirrels, their necks broken, to the garbage. Then one night I found a squirrel wounded but still alive in one of the traps. I knew I couldn’t let it go. Even if it survived its injury, even if it avoided being run over by a car, even if it escaped neighborhood dogs, stray cats, coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, werewolves, and pangolins it would just get back into the house. And if it didn’t it was still 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. 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 to make this as quick and merciful as possible for both of us. I nearly lost my nerve at the last minute. My wife had suggested I use a hatchet, but I didn’t want to do that because I’d actually have to look at the squirrel.
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.
After the clang of the shovel faded, I heard someone a few houses away in their backyard practicing “Jingle Bells” on a flute. 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. I also understand that 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. 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 glad for Hillel’s tradition; glad that lights were being lit against the dark. I didn’t feel compelled to think about all these things as I emptied the trap at the edge of the circle of light from the patio. I was glad for what seemed like a conspiracy by the universe to make me feel bad about what I’d done. I deserved it. 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. The Netsiliks, like other so-called primitive peoples, had specific rituals for killing seals, polar bears, and other animals they depended on for food. The Netsiliks said the rituals release the spirit of the animals back to the wild so they could return in earthly form. It’s a way of acknowledging their dependence on other species. I don’t think the disappearance of squirrels would tip the balance and lead to the extinction of homo sapiens, but being too casual about extermination does threaten 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 my own role in squirrelicide.
I realized I’d have to take the ladder outside, quit my whining about my fear of heights, find where the squirrels were getting in, and seal it up. It was up to me to keep them out, because ultimately that was the only way to prevent more deaths. I’m pretty sure that, somewhere in the contract, it says that I’m responsible for this because I’m the one with a memory, a conscience, and, for that matter, a big warm attic full of nesting material. It must be in the fine print.
“You may be a doctor. But I’m the Doctor. The definite article, you might say.”
Andi was, and always will be, my oldest friend, even though cancer caused a parting of our ways on August 16th, 1997. She would say we knew each other from birth. This may sound like an exaggeration, but our parents knew each other before we were born, so even though I was a little more than a year older neither one of us could say exactly when it was that we first met. And I accept it because Andi was funnier, smarter, and always had the last word no matter how much we argued. And we argued a lot. Because our parents got together several times a week and because we were so close in age we were often stuck together with no one to entertain us but each other, but she was a girl and I was a boy and we’d absorbed the inane notion that our age the opposite gender was the enemy even though neither of us could say why. Over the years we became as close as two friends could be, in spite of, or maybe because of constantly annoying, provoking, and cajoling each other at every opportunity. Years later when we were co-counselors at a day camp the kids we herded around thought this was funny. When one of them asked, “Are you two brother and sister?” we glanced at each other and, in a rare moment of agreement, said, yes, brother and sister is exactly what we were. Andi quickly added that I was adopted. She always had to have the last word.
Andi is also the reason I’m still and always will be a Doctor Who fan. Let’s travel back in time three decades. Our parents were in some other part of the house doing whatever it was they did when they got together on Saturday nights and she and I were in the den. It was a little after nine at night. Saturday Night Live didn’t start for almost an hour and a half. What were we going to do?
“We could watch Doctor Who,” she suggested.
I’d caught glimpses of Doctor Who on PBS as I was flipping through the channels. It always looked stupid and confusing to me with its cheap special effects and a tall goofy guy with curly hair and huge teeth. I always seemed to tune in about three-fourths of the way through a story, though, so picking up what was going on was nearly impossible. Still I agreed because I couldn’t think of anything else. I turned on the TV. The Doctor Who episode was Four To Doomsday, a pretty terrible story, and yet I was fascinated. So was Andi. As the events unspooled, becoming increasingly ridiculous-don’t get me started on the Doctor throwing a cricket ball in space-we were transformed into hardcore Doctor Who fans. Peter Davison’s Doctor was friendly and approachable; for a quarter of a century he’d hold the record for the youngest actor to play the Doctor, although I think it was the Doctor’s strong desire to save the world and willingness to stick it out even when escape would be easy that appealed to us.
We became really big fans. I subscribed to two Doctor Who publications: the official Doctor Who Magazine and the fan-created Whovian Times and shared the issues with Andi. We went to local conventions where, while I was getting his autograph, Colin Baker made fun of me for wearing a Star Trek t-shirt. We’d also meet Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee. When our parents punished us by keeping us away from the TV on Saturday night we taped the episodes for each other. We also traded Doctor Who books, novelizations of stories from the series-or at least we did until I built up the complete collection of more than a hundred titles, in addition to some big hardbacks about the show like Doctor Who, A Celebration, a book published to commemorate the series’ 20th anniversary. I also had a complete set of Marvel’s Doctor Who comics.
I sold all of those things–the books, the magazine issues, the comics–in the late summer of 2016. They’d been stuck in a box in the attic for years and while I was still a Doctor Who fan it seemed like a good time to let them go. I took them to The Great Escape, the same comic and memorabilia store where I’d bought most of my Doctor Who stuff all those years ago. I got rid of them because I wanted someone else to have and enjoy them.
I’m glad I let them go then and not now because, even though my reasons wouldn’t be any different, context matters. I’m still a Doctor Who fan, and I’m excited that the BBC has just announced the first ever female Doctor. Well, second, if you count Joanna Lumley, but only if you want to argue about whether Doctor Who: Curse Of The Fatal Death is canon. Some are turned off by the fact that a woman is finally taking the lead. For me as long as the Doctor is still the Doctor at hearts that’s all that matters, but I also think it’s about time.
The Doctor becoming a woman has seemed like a very real possibility ever since The Master became Missy, but this is not the first time the idea of the Doctor becoming a woman has come up. In fact it’s an idea that goes back at least as far as when Sylvester McCoy was still stuffing ferrets down his trousers. It’s worth noting that Doctor Who’s first producer was a woman. If Verity Lambert hadn’t been guiding the TARDIS from behind the scenes the show might not have made it past more than a few episodes, an early ‘60’s curiosity erased from memory and the BBC archives. In 1986 the show’s creator, Sidney Newman, called for a woman to play the Doctor. Around that same time Doctor Who Magazine reported a rumor that Patricia Quinn might be taking over the TARDIS controls. Even then the idea of the Doctor being played by a woman, and the idea of the worlds of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Doctor Who colliding gave me some terrible thrills, but that’s another story. It’s even possible that Doctor Who is influenced by Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, about a young man who wanders through four centuries of history, becoming a young woman along the way. The idea of the Doctor being played by a woman has always spurred furious debate among fans, but whenever Andi and I thought about the possibility it was another one of those rare times we didn’t argue. We both thought, why not?
The Doctor Who roleplaying game—which I also had and sold with the books, magazines, and comics–was another way Andi and I immersed ourselves in the Whoniverse. I usually acted as Gamemaster while Andi was Androveritagenerorlandolipolis, distant relative of Romana, and generally known to friends and enemies alike as Andris, a brilliant, fierce, argumentative, strongly independent Time Lord–in other words, Andi, if she’d been born on Gallifrey–who traveled the universe in jeans, sandals, and a t-shirt that read, “I Still Love My Late Uncle Borusa”. We quibbled a little over whether she was a Time Lord or a Time Lady, but neither one of us cared that much about semantics when there were Daleks to be defeated, Cybermen to be stopped, Ice Warriors on Mars, and an infinite universe to explore.
The game, or just general talks about Doctor Who, sometimes led to longer discussions about life, about what we wanted, what we feared. What started as an escape from scary reality became a way to sneak up on it and surprise each other with what we shared. Andi and I both thought about being writers. She also considered a career in acting, and in the ministry. I could say Andi had some of the Doctor’s best qualities: a strong sense of right and wrong, a strong desire to help others, and an occasionally prickly personality. And if I could go back in time and ask Andi if she thought I shared any of the Doctor’s best qualities she’d roll her eyes and say, “You wish.”
I still have a poetry chapbook Andi wrote, called Blood Lines, and sometimes when I think about her I pull it out and read “A Hairy Lullabye”, a poem that begins:
“Close your eyes my pretty darling,
Or three of them at least.”
My humming is in tune with
Jon Pertwee–
And goes on,
You know? I should hate you, but you’re such a big part of my life
Andi really would hate me if I didn’t admit that one of the things we would still argue about year later was who first suggested Doctor Who. She remembered that long ago Saturday night very differently. According to her I was the one who said, “We could watch Doctor Who.”
I’ll argue that my version of events is the correct one, but even without time travel she still gets the last word.
Last weekend my wife and I cleaned out a flowerbed in the front yard. It’s where she’s planted irises but over the years it’s gotten overgrown, mostly with honeysuckle which had to be pulled out by hand. I would have been fine with just setting the whole thing on fire, but that would have a deleterious effect on the irises and probably wouldn’t make the neighbors too happy either. And there was something really satisfying about lopping the thick stem of honeysuckle plants or, where I could, tearing out the entire plant by the roots, although it’s not personal. Well, it’s sort of personal. Honeysuckle is an invasive species imported from Asia sometime in the early 19th century and it tends to destroy other plants around it by competing for resources–its longer growing season gives it an advantage in this—and it also changes the soil chemistry to cut down on competition. Sure, I have fond memories of sucking the nectar out of honeysuckle blossoms, and it’s also an important food source for hummingbirds who also have fond memories of sucking the nectar out of honeysuckle, and it also has other advantages. Even though it’s a vine in some spots honeysuckle has grown up so much it forms a natural fence between adjoining yards, and it’s as true now as it was when Robert Frost first said it: honeysuckle fences make good neighbors.
Also I feel like a hypocrite for ripping out honeysuckle just because it’s an invasive species when I’m such an ardent defender of the dandelion, which, in North America, is also an invasive species, something people remind me of whenever I say how great dandelions are, or whenever I blow dandelion seeds all over their yards, which is kind of hard not to do. It’s not just that it’s fun to blow dandelion seeds, but also when you do it you get to make a wish, and who doesn’t wish for wishes? Also usually I’m not purposely blowing dandelion seeds into anyone else’s yard but they have a lot of lift so even if I’m in the middle of my own yard it’s inevitable that a few of them are going to drift over the border, even if there’s honeysuckle in the way, although not even dandelion seeds can cross the Atlantic. Even though the dandelion is spread across the Eurasian continent it probably wasn’t introduced to North America until European settlers brought it on the Mayflower in 1620—which means its arrival predates that of honeysuckle by about two centuries, but being here longer doesn’t make it better.
Still it’s complicated. Are invasive species necessarily a bad thing? The changing of the landscape is a natural process and it can raise complicated questions, like, how the hell did I get poison ivy on the back of my right knee? I was wearing jeans and how could it get back there and not anywhere else? And there are thorny issues, such as, what is that thorny vine that grows up around the honeysuckle? Actually I don’t care what that stuff is or whether it’s invasive or a native species. If it stabs me through my work gloves again I’m going to set it on fire.
I don’t often recycle old posts but thought I’d bring back his one from a few years ago since St. Patrick’s Day is tomorrow.
In recent years St. Patrick’s Day has become controversial because of a maligned and often caricatured minority. I’m referring, of course, to leprechauns. Reviled, mistreated, and still all too frequently portrayed as happy little figures sitting on toadstools smoking pipes even though increasingly they’re switching to e-cigarettes the leprechaun is still the object of prejudice and misconceptions. Many of us, in fact, have passed by or even worked alongside leprechauns, often without realizing it. In the interests of time I’ll just be addressing a few of the most common misconceptions here. The first is the ancient belief that leprechauns are mischievous, even dangerous creatures. Stories of leprechauns luring travelers into bogs or inflicting injuries on those passing through wooded areas go back as far as the 8th century, but sociologists now agree that such behavior is not characteristic of leprechauns, and is, in fact, quite rare. While there may be some basis in truth for these stories it’s widely accepted that destructive behavior was the act of a minority among leprechauns who, feeling marginalized from the culture as a whole, acted out in anti-social ways. Unfortunately this misconception has been perpetuated and reinforced by stories that are still told to children, as well as in movies, such as the 1993 film Leprechaun, its many sequels including 2000’s Leprechaun in the Hood, and, of course, the 1980 Al Pacino movie Cruising. There is also a less common misconception of leprechauns as helpful. There are stories of leprechauns discreetly doing farm work, including harvesting, milking cows, and repairing small machinery. Again there may be some basis for these stories, but not all leprechauns enjoy the outdoors or are suited for farm work. Many prefer to work in offices, or seek employment in fields such as shoemaking. This is, of course, not to say that all leprechauns are adept at working with footwear, but many did find this to be an accepted trade. It’s believed this originated from leprechauns making shoes for fairies who, being generally more accepted, would be asked by more common folk where they got such amazing stilettoes. Working as cobblers proved to be profitable even when leprechauns were subject to such fierce discrimination that they were kept out of most cities and towns and had to form their own exclusive villages, commonly known as leprechaulonies. Stories of farmers rewarding helpful leprechauns with suits of clothes, only to find that the leprechauns considered this an insult and would disappear, may also have some basis in truth, mainly because you can’t expect a leprechaun to wear that coat with those pants, especially after Labor Day. Finally we come to the most common and persistent belief about leprechauns: that they are hoarders of massive quantities of gold which they keep in pots at the end of rainbows. This belief has been so pervasive that attempts have been made to lure leprechauns with artificial rainbows by everyone from Sir Isaac Newton to the manager of the band Pink Floyd. As a belief it was understandable at a time when people regarded meteorological phenomena as magical, unlike now when it’s understood that rainbows are caused by the refraction of sunlight through water droplets suspended in centaur farts. Because rainbows rarely have ends that reach the ground it’s still not understood how exactly leprechauns could have kept their alleged pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, in spite of several theories advanced by folklorists and experiments attempting to hang pots of gold from rainbows using balloons. A frequently repeated tale is that a leprechaun, when caught, may be forced to give up the location of his pot of gold, but only if the person who caught him keeps his eyes fixed on the leprechaun. In stories of this type the leprechaun often escapes capture by telling the person who caught him that there’s a fierce beast or the Chrysler building just over his shoulder. Folklorists believe that there is some truth in this, but only to the extent that leprechauns seem to have invented the “made you look” joke. Also it’s now known that leprechauns are not inherently wealthy. While there are some who have enjoyed success—the heir to the Lucky Charms fortune, for instance, or Mickey Rooney—leprechauns are no more likely to be wealthy than the general population.That concludes the lecture for today. In preparation for next week read pages 126-153, when we will be discussing genetic mutation and its potential for altering reality. Our lab work will involve real four-leaf clovers, but I’d better not catch any of you wishing for a better grade.
I have a contract with the squirrels. They may not consider it legally binding but it should be understood by both of us that they’re supposed to stay out of my attic and not come in to make nests in the insulation and chew the rafters and wiring. Since I can’t retaliate by moving into their nests in the trees I reserve the right to set traps in the attic. A few years ago I woke up to squirrels or mice or used car salesmen or some other kind of vermin scrabbling around in the ceiling over my head. I set traps in the attic and whatever it was avoided the traps and went away. I like to think it or they saw the traps and said, “Holy mackerel, let’s move to some place safer like a nuclear reactor!” This is the way it should work. In December, though, a few dumb squirrels moved in and were holding cocktail parties well past midnight. I announced the terms of our agreement very loudly as I set out traps smeared with peanut butter. I didn’t really want to set the traps, primarily because that meant going up in the attic, which meant climbing that rickety wooden ladder. The ladder has two warnings on it. One, in huge print, says, “Failure to use ladder correctly could result in damage to the ladder!” As far as I can tell “failure to use ladder correctly” means dousing it with gasoline and setting it on fire. The other warning, in fine print, says, “Oh yeah, you might also hurt yourself, so please take off those stupid slippers and put on some real shoes.” But the real problem is I don’t like heights, or, to be more specific, landing at the bottom of them. I get the shakes when I stand on a chair. Once in the attic I’m fine because I’m on solid ground again, or at least solid plywood over that insulation that looks like cotton candy but tastes much better. It’s the climbing part that gets to me, especially since I have to use at least one hand to carry the traps. I use the spring bar traps, the kind that are sold under the slogan, “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door,” except I use the larger ones. The slogan for the large ones is: “These will cut your fingers off.” I could pride myself on being able to set these traps and position them with the steady hands of a neurosurgeon or bomb defuser, but there’s nothing good about any part of the job.
In her poem “Woodchucks” Maxine Kumin goes from killing the woodchucks with poison gas to picking them off with a gun. It ends with her saying there’s one woodchuck who eludes her, and she concludes, “If only they’d all consented to die unseen/gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” It’s not a perfect metaphor, although if it were it wouldn’t be a metaphor. The only perfect metaphor that I know of in English literature is, “a rose is a rose is a rose”. There was 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. Interspecies violence is, like it or not, part of nature, and often fundamental to survival. The squirrels don’t know this, of course, any more than Kumin’s woodchucks who saw her garden as an open buffet. When I set traps for the squirrels it wasn’t because of an irrational and unnecessary prejudice against them. It was because they could chew through an electric cord and burn the house down, which would mean we’d all be out of a place to live. And I hoped the squirrels would see the traps and leave. Unfortunately it didn’t work that way. I took several squirrels, their necks broken, to the garbage. Then one night I found a squirrel wounded but still alive in one of the traps. I knew I couldn’t let it go. Even if it survived its injury, even if it avoided being run over by a car, even if it escaped neighborhood dogs, stray cats, coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, werewolves, and pangolins it would just get back into the house. And if it didn’t it was still 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. 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 to make this as quick and merciful as possible for both of us. I nearly lost my nerve at the last minute. My wife had suggested I use a hatchet, but I didn’t want to do that because I’d actually have to look at the squirrel.
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.
After the clang of the shovel faded, I heard someone a few houses away in their backyard practicing “Jingle Bells” on a flute. 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. I also understand that 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. 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 glad for Hillel’s tradition; glad that lights were being lit against the dark. I didn’t feel compelled to think about all these things as I emptied the trap at the edge of the circle of light from the patio. I was glad for what seemed like a conspiracy by the universe to make me feel bad about what I’d done. I deserved it. 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. The Netsiliks, like other so-called primitive peoples, had specific rituals for killing seals, polar bears, and other animals they depended on for food. The Netsiliks said the rituals release the spirit of the animals back to the wild so they could return in earthly form. It’s a way of acknowledging their dependence on other species. I don’t think the disappearance of squirrels would tip the balance and lead to the extinction of homo sapiens, but being too casual about extermination does threaten 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 my own role in squirrelicide.
I realized I’d have to take the ladder outside, quit my whining about my fear of heights, find where the squirrels were getting in, and seal it up. It was up to me to keep them out, because ultimately that was the only way to prevent more deaths. I’m pretty sure that, somewhere in the contract, it says that I’m responsible for this because I’m the one with a memory, a conscience, and, for that matter, a big warm attic full of nesting material. It must be in the fine print.
This is the time of year when I pull out my copy of The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe and peruse some old favorites. What’s your favorite Poe tale?
The number of pizza places is not a joke. I plagiarize from reality, folks.
There’s a new pizza place going in just a block from where I work. By my count that’s the seventh pizza place within a half mile radius, not counting places that aren’t exclusively for pizza but still sell pizza. If you include them the number goes up to a hundred and seventeen, including the doughnut shop that’s serving up its special pizza doughnut–for a limited time only because no one really wants to eat that, but that’s another story. I realize it’s near a college campus but even when I was a college student I didn’t eat pizza more than twice a day four days a week. How can that many pizza places in such a small area survive and, more importantly, how different could they possibly be from each other? Some may be better than others but it’s still going to be flattened bread with, in most cases, a tomato-based sauce, some cheese, and various toppings ranging from meats to vegetables to mushrooms, which aren’t exactly vegetables but they’re sure not meats and while some pizza places serve good mushrooms at others you might as well ask for pencil erasers. What’s funny to me is I noticed the new pizza place just as I was thinking about accusations of joke theft against various comedians, most recently Amy Schumer. But as some of her defenders have pointed out she’s making jokes about popular topics—sex, race, men and women—that get covered by a lot of other comedians. It’s really hard to come up with something on almost any broad topic that’s going to be funny and that hasn’t already been thought of by someone else. Unless you’re Steve Martin making a joke about working on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom 7″ gangly wrench to a roomful of plumbers–a joke, by the way, that had been going around plumbers’ conventions since Roman times–it’s almost impossible to avoid instances of parallel thinking, a term I freely admit I’ve taken from somewhere else, even if I can’t remember where.
I know some performers are really guilty of outright plagiarism because they’re too lazy to write their own jokes and too cheap to pay someone genuinely funny to write jokes for them and that’s a terrible thing and I think they should be booed off the stage, but then I get worried because everybody else around me is yelling “boo!” and I feel like I should come up with something original to yell. And then I feel guilty because I’m not sure whether joke theft is a joking matter, especially since there have been times when I’ve felt like a victim of joke theft. Many years ago I wrote something about videophones and how I thought there would be a big market for miniature interior design so people could impress each other with cool backgrounds. About six months later there was a commercial with Jason Alexander trying to impress a woman he’s video chatting with by putting up a cool backdrop in his shabby apartment. Of course I realized that it was extremely unlikely whoever wrote the commercial had read what I’d written–it was probably just a case of parallel thinking. A true original idea at that time would have been to realize that eventually mobile phones would have video capability and that if you want to impress someone you’re talking to by having, say, the pyramids in the background all you need to do is hold up your phone while you’re standing in front of the pyramids.
And possibly originality is overrated. There’s an episode of Frasier where Frasier and his brother Niles read an unpublished manuscript by a reclusive author, and then they try to one-up each other by coming up with clever things to say about it. One of the things they come up with is that the story’s structure is based on Dante’s Divine Comedy and the author, frustrated because he feels he has nothing original left to say, throws the manuscript out the window and, hey, I just got the irony of Frasier and Niles trying to one-up each other with unique insights. But it’s not like Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven were concepts invented entirely by Dante, nor is he the only artist to use them form metaphorical purposes. Imagine if someone had said to Hieronymous Bosch, “Hey, that Garden of Earthly Delights triptych is really cool. Did you get the idea from Dante?” and he had said, “What? I thought I had an original idea here!” and burned it. Or maybe it would be Dante being asked if he’d gotten the idea for The Divine Comedy from Bosch. I don’t know. I can’t remember which one came first. This also reminds me of a short story called “Who’s Cribbing?” by Jack Lewis about an author whose short story submissions keep getting rejected because the editors accuse him of copying the stories of an earlier writer he’s never even heard of. And as one of the editors tells him the chances of two authors writing exactly the same story, word for word, are the same as the chances of four royal flushes on a single deal. Now that I think about it, though, four royal flushes on a single deal isn’t impossible–it’s just extremely unlikely. When I was eating pizza twice a day four times a week I read that story to a bunch of my friends and we all agreed it was a writer’s worst nightmare because we forgot that even Shakespeare lifted whole plots from other sources and that a great source of creativity is being inspired by others. There’s a fine line between copying and retelling, and stealing from one source is plagiarism while stealing from many is research. I forget who that line is commonly attributed to, but I’m sure they heard it from someone else.
Granted I do think copyright is important, to an extent. Artists deserve to be paid for their work (and if you’re enjoying this won’t you please donate?) and one way they can ensure they track their work to make sure they get paid for it is through copyright protection. Mozart’s Don Giovanni was a flop in Vienna but went on to become a blockbuster in Prague. He died in dire poverty because he never saw a penny of that revenue, but they could at least have sent him a Czech. What I’m getting at is that if Mozart had gotten a share of the profits from his work he might still be alive today, even though he’d be two-hundred and sixty now and collecting killer royalty checks. Ray Davies expressed his frustration with this problem in the Kinks song The Moneygoround, although the album went on to be Top of the Pops. On the other hand some works only really become widely known because being really cheap or even free means they get passed around and a lot of airplay. It took decades for Moe Howard and Larry Fine to finally get some financial compensation and at that point most of the other Stooges were dead. The syndication of their films made the studio that owned them a tremendous amount of money and the Stooges certainly deserved a cut of that, but if their law firm of Dewey, Cheathem, and Howe had given them extensive and complicated contracts the cost of replaying their films could have gone up and they wouldn’t have gotten as much airplay and consequently wouldn’t have been as profitable or as famous. Whether this is good or bad is a question I’ll leave you wiseguys to murtilate each other over because the value of copyright and its abuse is a whole can of worms I don’t want to open because I’m afraid I’ll be sued by the publisher of at least one of about two dozen books titled Can Of Worms that are out there, not to mention the song by Squeeze.
Again, plagiarized from reality.
What I’m getting at is that the best any creative person can do is offer their own unique vision, keeping in mind a joke that’s been around since I was at least a kid in Roman times: each of us is an individual, just like everybody else. So who wants pizza?
Every year on the first night of Hanukkah I stop to remember a squirrel.
Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.
I have a contract with the squirrels. It’s understood by both of us that they’re supposed to stay out of my attic and not come in to make nests in the insulation and chew the cables. Since I can’t retaliate by moving into their nests in the trees I reserve the right to set traps in the attic. A few years ago I woke up to squirrels or mice or used car salesmen or some other kind of vermin scrabbling around in the ceiling over my head. I set traps in the attic and whatever it was avoided the traps and went away. I like to think it or they saw the traps and said, “Holy mackerel, let’s move to some place safer like a nuclear reactor!” This is the way it should work. In December, though, a few dumb squirrels moved in and were holding cocktail parties well past midnight. I announced the terms of our agreement very loudly as I set out traps smeared with peanut butter. I didn’t really want to set the traps, primarily because that meant going up in the attic, which meant climbing that rickety wooden ladder. The ladder has two warnings on it. One, in huge print, says, “Failure to use ladder correctly could result in damage to the ladder!” As far as I can tell “failure to use ladder correctly” means dousing it with gasoline and setting it on fire. The other warning, in fine print, says, “Oh yeah, you might also hurt yourself, so please take off those stupid slippers and put on some real shoes.”
But the real problem is I don’t like heights, or, to be more specific, landing at the bottom of them. I get the shakes when I stand on a chair. Once in the attic I’m fine because I’m on solid ground again, or at least solid plywood over that insulation that looks like cotton candy but tastes much better. It’s the climbing part that gets to me, especially since I have to use at least one hand to carry the traps. I use the spring bar traps, the kind that are sold under the slogan, “Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door,” except I use the larger ones. The slogan for the large ones is: “These will cut your fingers off.” I could pride myself on being able to set these traps and position them with the steady hands of a neurosurgeon or bomb defuser, but there’s nothing good about any part of the job. Maxine Kumin’s poem about killing woodchucks in her garden ends with her saying there’s one woodchuck who eludes her gun, and she concludes, “If only they’d all consented to die unseen/gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.” It’s not a perfect metaphor, although if it were it wouldn’t be a metaphor.
The only perfect metaphor that I know of in English literature is, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” The Jews didn’t do anything to the Nazis. There was no justification for the concentration camps. The woodchucks, on the other hand, threatened Kumin’s food supply, or at least her rhubarb and brussels sprouts. And the squirrels in my attic could chew through an electric cord and burn the house down, which would mean we’d all be out of a place to live. I thought about all this the night I found a squirrel wounded but still alive in one of the traps. I knew I couldn’t let it go. Even if it survived its injury, even if it avoided being run over by a car, even if it escaped neighborhood dogs, stray cats, coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, werewolves, and pangolins it would just get back into the house. I knew all this, but I wasn’t looking forward to what I knew I had to do either. 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 to to make this as quick and merciful as possible for both of us, although I nearly lost my nerve at the last minute. My wife had suggested I use a hatchet, but I didn’t want to do that because I’d actually have to look at the squirrel. 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. After the clang of the shovel faded, I heard someone a few houses away in their backyard practicing “Jingle Bells” on a flute. 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. Hanukkah is a holiday that celebrates hope and perseverance. It’s about a miracle of light and life coming to people who have just been through darkness and death. I didn’t feel compelled to think about all these things as I emptied the trap. I was glad for what seemed like a conspiracy by the universe to make me feel bad about what I’d done. I deserved it. I can rationalize out the wazoo. 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 tell myself that rodents are the cockroaches of the mammal family. 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. 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 my own role in squirrelicide. I realized I’d have to take the ladder outside, quit my whining about my fear of heights, find where the squirrels were getting in, and seal it up. It was up to me to keep them out, because ultimately that was the only way to prevent more deaths. I’m pretty sure that, somewhere in the contract, it says that I’m responsible for this because I’m the one with a memory, a conscience, and, for that matter, a big warm attic full of nesting material. It must be in the fine print.
Every year on the first night of Hanukkah I take a moment to remember a squirrel. This is a revised version of a previous post.
Every year on the first night of Hanukkah I take a moment to remember a squirrel. This is a revised version of a previous post.
