A smoking squirrel to add perspective

Driving home from the pharmacy I noticed a guy halfway into the intersection, fixing a flat tire. I had the baby in the car seat, and I was looking at this guy just sitting there in the intersection in a place no one normally sits, right there where everything usually rushes by. Kind of a public place for a breakdown, I thought.


Weird how we usually choose a quieter, more off-road place for our personal breakdowns, and how life (or cars) blow a hole right through that nice, neat theory. Sometimes a breakdown is waiting to happen, out of our control, right there, for everyone to see.

To ease the horror of that thought, the guy looked pretty relaxed in the middle of the road. I think once you get over the fear of being run down, of almost crashing, and being stared at, that you just get down on the ground and deal with the problem at hand, the flat tire. You hope someone comes along to help, and before you know it it's all over. Maybe the view from the cement, in the middle of the road, cars rushing by, your tire a shriveled mess - maybe the view isn't so bad from there. Maybe, in fact, it's more interesting than regular life.

It'd be nice to realize that the natural resistance we have to having anything go wrong is futile. I thought of that when watching a squirrel crawl off into our woods as he was breathing his last breaths in our yard the other day. (I think he was a smoker.) He was moving so slowly, it was sad, he wasn't trying to get away so badly, as much as trying to just be someplace safe. It was cold and I was afraid the squirrel would freeze to death. I tried to encourage him off to the side. He crawled right into the greenest evergreen tree I have in my woods.

With no dogs trying to eat him, and his days balancing on phone wires coming to an end, I felt like saying to him, "Look up. Look up and see where you got yourself. You're surrounded by the greenest tree you will see this winter, life is still worth living as sometime soon the woods will be all green again." With that he seemed like he smiled at me, gave me a quick wink and ran off still hacking from his lungs do to all those years of mistaking acorns for cigarette butts.


Peace in the breakdown.

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