I’m always wanting to write about everything. About old men watching squirrels. About the squirrels in my back yard, about how they live in the hollowed out apple tree, how the apple tree has outlived all our predictions, continuing to exist gnarled and fruitful with sweet apples even though two of its few limbs are attached by little more vascularity than the underside strips of bark after falling to the ground. They have been propped on 4x4 posts for years now, and against all odds, are still alive.
There never used to be squirrels in the back yard. Our family gathered around the tree living into all the space. We were unpredictable: the all of us, our child, her friends, our friends, the cousins, everyone's parents, some aunts and uncles, a few neighbors, two spirited and emotional dogs, and our bite-y scratchy cat... it was all too robust and excitable for a squirrel to risk.
So they never, ever came into our yard. They ran along the high wires and through the outer side yard, but only one time in a decade did I see a squirrel within the fence line, and it scrambled away frantically at the flick of my shadow.
But now, Willie is gone, Owen is gone, Nevada soon will be gone, no one is loud or unpredictable, the cousins and friends have moved away... the backyard is quiet and empty.
And squirrels aren't just unguarded; they have boldly taken the broken tree. They have moved in and started squirrel families; established squirrel communities; built squirrel churches; squirrel schools; squirrel infrastructure; and squirrel superhighways. For daring to sit in the backyard they scream relentlessly from treetop terminal limbs, fence lines, and roof tops, screaming until yes, fine, okay, okay, ok... we go inside.
I don’t resent the backyard squirrels for moving into this vacuum. But if they are a sign of new life, it is not a sign of restoration. They are grass in the asphalt, one ecosystem giving way to another. Decay is not renewal.
I only think about them this much because they keep the patients entertained. I hear it almost everyday. Decaying in hospital beds or fluffed into wheelchairs, they sit staring out the window: I’m just watching the squirrels. they’re funny little things. There is no old folks home for squirrels, I think… no pillows, no pills... but from the the inside I’m not sure who’s got the better deal.
This visit today, a man lays half turned to the tv, half toward the window. A prosthetic leg, with it’s sock liner stands near the sill. I see it and know he is a tall man.
He says he is Polish and I think I recognize a unique eastern European phenotype... he looks so much like an old boyfriend of mine, but aged. Big but withered. Everything is great, he says, and recounts all the improving markers of health, says he is fighting like hell to get stronger because he has laid in bed for over a month and has become significantly de-conditioned... "so i'm fighting," he says, "except they also just told me I have cancer..." and he starts crying.
He’s so much like my dad laying there, except my dad failed to thrive. He didn’t lose a leg in the war. He went AWOL and lived in the backwoods of New York harvesting ginseng until they hauled him back. And he didn’t fight like hell to become stronger. He didn’t fight like hell for anything. Instead, he became too weak to care for himself, to weak to walk, too weak to even sit up because he refused to work with PT. He had cancer and wanted everyone else to fight for him, to fix him as he lay there increasingly atrophied.
This man looking at squirrels is not my dad. His crying is painful to witness only because he can’t do it. He can not do it. He can only fight it, barely holding off his voice pitched higher and higher. This man has probably never cried. None of them have. Not really. Not from the toes up until empty. He can barely cry from the top of his throat.
They always apologize, fight off the tears, and always manage to bring their rogue humanity back under control. I’m sympathetic, bigger internally than my boundary of professionalism. My heart aches.
But suddenly he pivots to covid, becomes angry dismissing the fascism of masks and conspiracy of vaccines… pfft! He isn’t contemplating mortality now. Anger has completely defused this significant existential moment. That, I realize stupidly, is why they say anger is analgesic. Almost effortlessly, he escaped the same feelings destroying me. Is this the only way out of the mud sucking at my feet?
My sympathy becomes listless, and again I’m reminded of my dad... it swirls all together in dispassionate tragedy: the company of squirrels, the fragility of men, oldness and brokenness, roused by fear and anger. I don’t have to sort it out. I just keep letting it pass through me, my hands barely not outpacing my brain, safely behind aloof professionalism. The things running around in my head, engaging with memories and evocative emotions, those are just the squirrels of consciousness... I don't have to own them. I don’t have to chase them away. They’re acting out a story, about my dad and his arc superimposed on this man, they put a wrist on the brow, they weep, they chatter and scatter... they’re just thoughts I observe and nothing more, just like the squirrels outside the window unbothered by the crumbling audience of old men and old dogs.
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