Aaaargh! I had a difficult relationship w/ a girlfriend that did not get
better after we found a bat floundered around in the gutter on a town
street. She insisted I take it home and take care of it. My stepfather,
who had many times taken in injured animals and knew about such things
told me the best thing to do with a bat... since their wings are so
delicate and obviously this one had broken wings... there was nothing
short to do than kill it. I was not too happy about this but humane duty
is humane duty. I placed it on a large rock and then I dropped another
large rock on it. I should have known better than to tell the erstwhile
girlfriend about what I had done.

So, the other day the neighbor lady whom I watch outside my writing
space but have never previously spoken with, her Jack Russell terror was
over on our side of the street while I loaded up the car to go to work,
and I told the dog nicely to go home. The dog usually behaves and stays
in his own unfenced yard -- which I think is pretty remarkable for the
breed.

Anyways, there had been a black n/ white cat that sat near a tree that
was pretty patient and I did not notice why it was there. But I said hello.

The lady when her dog came back over to her yard she told it to chase
the squirrel that was at the base of the tree that the cat had been
watching. Jack Russell’s are fairly fast dogs if not outright yippy
irritations.

So the terrier runs over and grabs onto the squirrel that does not run
up the tree. I'm reminded of when we were kids of our cats that would
catch chipmunks and we would run over to grab hold before any serious
damage was done. For a while we had a colony of captured chipmunks
living in a large rain barrel in the basement. But we don’t need a
squirrel colony. It was bad enough with the prairie dogs particularly
the one I attempted to educate out of latching onto my thumb and not
letting go... they eventually got loose and for all we know started
their own colony on the south shore.

The lady runs over and grabs the terrier's tail and pulls and grabs the
dog's belly and begins to yell and shake it. The dog lets go of the
squirrel while the lady freaks out.

So I run and get a bucket and put the squirrel in it and we talk about
sick squirrels... like I DON'T want to get bit by the squirrel but it
just sort of lays in the bucket and looks at me. I have no clue what
goes through a squirrel brain. Seems the lady found dead squirrels and
birds in her yard... but not crows or blue jays which would be a sign of
West Nile (like we need fatal meningitis). We have a problem here that
we live surrounded by federal parkland in a wet area and they do not
spray for skeeters. And related to dead animals a few years back all of
the raccoons died off from distemper. And she found a dead cardinal and
felt bad about it because she loves cardinals. I looked out the kitchen
window last week and with my bad distance eyes wondered what the red
thing was in the street until I realized it was a cardinal sitting on
the yard fence.

I tell the lady I will take care of the squirrel.

Back to the house I wake up my wife (for a while she was known as the
chicken lady in the neighborhood and whenever anyone found a stray
chicken they would bring them to her)... I'm supposed to be going to
work and now I am late.

So we confer over the squirrel, and our dogs... and I give the squirrel
a small bowl of water and I make sure not to get bit, and set the
squirrel in the bucket up on a high table in the yard, in the shade, and
I figure it is in shock and will either bleed to death internally or not
and recover and get out of the bucket on it's own. So I go off to work.
Nothing at work goes as planned. This is not unusual. My wife goes back
to bed.

When I get home I ask about the squirrel seeing as I can see the bucket
is tipped over and fallen off the table.

So my wife tells me that she forgot about the squirrel and the last she
saw of it our dog, Mudslide, was shaking the living shit out of it...
and it was now a dead squirrel without a doubt.

So I asked, Where is it? To whit, where your dog left it. So I go look
and find a rigor mortis squirrel splayed out kind of flat with legs
stuck out in front of the barbie w/ beginnings of maggots etc. and I put
the stiff corpse in a plastic garbage bag. I push it around w/ a stick,
and then into the container on the street where in the nice heat wave we
have had it smells up the place real good for a few days.

During pizza lunch w/ my son & business partner the other day... it was
a really hot day in Greenwich Village and we felt it pretty bad after 4
hours on the face of a brick bldg. where we baked in the sun... so
anyways we got on the topic of global warming and I told him about how I
heard on the radio about a bog in Russia the size of Germany & France
combined that is warming up and set to let off a very large cloud of
methane gas... a gas that contributes to global warming... and I thought
of our govt. doing their study on the effect of flatulent cows and at
the same time the administration's denial of global warming (it must be
intelligent warming and a God directed act that happens after the Cold
War only in godless Russia where bogs get hot) -- leastways my son did
not appreciate my scientific candor in the midpoint of his lunch. So I
did not tell him then about the deceased squirrel though earlier he had
been perplexed about what to do w/ a mouse in his apartment and not
being quite satisfied when I suggested that he feed it cheese and teach
it to watch him play computer games.... as his grandfather would likely
do only in his case to watch old movies like Claudette Colbert late at
night on the TV w/ his pet house mouse.

Later on the night of the day of the great squirrel slaughter the lady
across the street is all concerned and asks me how the squirrel is doing
to which I reply, It did not make it. No elaboration. It did not make it.

I saw a giant of a fellow put out birds into some cages along the road
today and I stopped to look at them. Again w/ the bad eyes I thought
maybe he had chuckers.

It was an assortment of pigeons. He asked me if I was interested in
birds. A bit. I used to have a pair of tumblers... he wanted to know if
American or English? I told him it was more than twenty years ago. He
said a lot happens in twenty years. I agree. Hell if I remember what
they were. They flew and tumbled. I can see them.

Regardless, he pointed out the different types that he had there and
pointed at the two brown rabbits and said, These ones don't fly. I
misunderstood him and said, Oh, are they for show only?

I was tempted to buy a pair... of pigeons, not rabbits, but what I
really look for is Peking ducks for Mudslide, the border collie who
always needs a job and likes to herd... and I would prefer his job not
be to kill sick squirrels left to treage in buckets set in the yard. He
does a pretty good job already to police cats when they venture into our
fenced yard as the lady behind us feeds all of the strays that come her
way. We have not yet taken to call her the cat lady.

][<

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