Équinoxe d'automne

Heureusement, c’est aujourd’hui dimanche.  Au lit, je feuilletais les journaux;  et puis, les yeux mi-clos, me laissais mijoter dan un livre audio de Proust.   Le café noir n’avait eu qu’un effect transitoire;  qu’un verre de Bordeaux  fasse la besogne ….

Comme remarqua M. Swann jadis, avec une telle justesse (bien qu’à titre d’autres exemples, plus familiers de son temps -- enfin bref, mutatis mutandis), mieux eût valu que les quotidiens racontent les sentences d’Edward Gibbon au sujet des empires,  ou du feu Einstein  sur la pensée intime des molécules;  et que les bouquins poussiéreux, guère touchés du doigt, contiennent les faits-divers à propos des jumelles Olsen, ou les péplums de la télé.

All’s for the best, in this best of all squirrely worlds

There is a parable somewhere, probably among the Muslims, concerning one small helpless creature -- let us posit:  a mouse -- who got trapped somewhere on a lofty cliff;  yet survived, and lived to an old age, because each day, without fail, winging its way across hundreds of miles  of depthless chasms and fearsome crags, a bird came, bearing in its beak  the daily sustenance of that grateful mouse.

And thus we learn, O ye faithful, that God  the maker of all things, who raised the firmament upon the pillars of the Earth,  doth provide, in weal and in ill, for all his creatures.

(So endeth the lesson for today.)

~

The other day, expecting company, I finally swept the deck.  Yet between the planks, little bits of things were wedged, which the broom could not dislodge.  I considered fetching a knife or a screwdriver to try to pry the things out;  but then thought, de minimis.

Now, this morning, this sweet silent Sunday, to my surprise and delight, that gentle little squirrel (smallest of all her kind) whom I wed last week  while in a state of sciurine metempsychosis (for I am far too old-fashioned to contemplate cross-species matrimony), returned to our back deck.  (You can read all about our nuptials  here.)  Now, the deck had been swept, whereon she might browse at ease and nibble her fill :  Yet lo!  From out those very cracks, her tiny paws did daintily dig  a sufficiency of tasty seed, preserved there faithfully from the wind or from consumption by larger creatures,  to keep her coat fluffy, her tail frisky, her black eyes bright!  --  My belovèd!  My bride!

 

[Theological update]   Biblical scholars have pointed out that the above anecdote, and its moral, ratify the wisdom of the Torah:

And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the squirrel.

-- Leviticus 23:22 (my own translation)

 

The price of tea in China …

… is only marginally less gripping a topic for me, than the price of coffee in America.   True, I do quaff a fair amount of the stuff, in the course of duty,  Saving American Lives by day, and reading deeply in Dickens by night.  But I stay away from pricey Starbucks, and grind my own from bags bought in a buyer’s market and stored in the freezer till needed;  so if the consumer price of whole beans were to bump up a bit, I would muddle through.   Still, it was startling to learn, this morning from NPR, not that the price has recently risen (it rises, it falls, it rises, it falls, world without end, like the billows of the deep blue sea) but that a ten-percent uptick was being imposed … by Kraft !

Kraft and coffee ?!?  [Page-editor:  Insert incredulous emoticons here.]  Branding problem here, yo.   For anyone who grew up under Eisenhower, the name Kraft has a fixed association with “bad cheese”.   For the convenience of millennials, who may be unfamiliar with this equation, we may summarize it in a simple formula:

bad cheese  <==> Kraft

(The mapping is a bijection, and can be read from right to left, or left to right.)

Now, with all the snooty pricey hoity-toity lifted-pinky caffe-latte emporia  pestilentializing the land,  and the growing ethic  not only of grind-your-own, but roast-your-own (my workmate/podmate, guided by his ex-barista offspring, last weekend filled his kitchen with the stench of the stuff), it is actually reassuring to hear that there are still some folks (mostly farmers, one supposes) who are content to source their morning coffee from Kraft.   That sort of brew goes very well with stacks of pancakes, I understand.

But what tipped it into the realm of near science-fiction -- a time-travel fantasy -- was the rider that Kraft would not be applying the 10% rise, to its … instant !!

Instant … coffee … That is almost nostalgic -- meta-retro -- like Tang.  (Of course, Tang was never any good either.)

Maryland man trapped in his own home !!

Right now I’d like to go out on the back deck, and begin the tantalizing book that just arrived in the mail (the philosopher Collingwood’s Autobiography), in the shaded sunshine and the wafting breeze, 

with a glass of the blushful, and a little plate of sunflower seeds,

and all the weekend before me.

But ….

right …. there, on the deck,

is the world’s most adorable smallsoft Miss Minisquirrel,

with her own little seedtreat,

tailcurled, pawposed,
nibbling, nibbling
(such tiny bites!)

and I cannot bear to scare her away.

Of course, she might take it in a nice way,

particularly if she sees my plate of seeds

(which I am willing to share).

“See?  I eat seeds, like thee.
I do not gobble squirrels.”

But more likely  she would flee,

traumatized, never to return,

breathlessly telling all her forestfriends

what a mean man lives in the house on the hill.

And so she grazes, finding evernew yummysomethings,

edging ever closer and closer to the house,

while I sit hopeless/helpless,

gazing through the glass,

thinking (now with the brain of a boysquirrel),

“Will  U   mar-ry  me …. ???”