As I said in a previous post, I wouldn’t
try to compare myself to the late Bernard Baruch in any other way, but he was
known for conducting business from a park bench, and I’ve found that to be a
really good way to do that.
My bench -- I’ve come to think of it as
my “writing bench” -- is in a park-like area of the senior community I live in.
It has figured in another post or two on this blog. I keep coming back to it
not so much to look at the scene, although that’s really soothing, but to
listen to the quiet. Most days the breeze is off the ocean and there’s no sound;
you don’t hear anything. True, airliners
go over periodically at a few hundred feet on the flight path to the airport eight
miles to the west, but that’s less an annoyance than a reassuring reminder that
you’re still part of the world outside your little community. You don’t want to
become completely disconnected from the world, wars, and famines.
There are squirrels that live here with
us, and I used to feed them at this bench (the final piece of the picture of
the Senior Citizen) but since coyotes discovered easy pickings on the campus I
can’t do that any more. It’s considered fattening the squirrels for the coyotes,
who became amazingly bold at one point, inviting an eradication program to be
put in place. Now if a squirrel looks like it’s coming toward the bench I get
up and leave. One day I had to watch as one actually hopped on to the bench to
see if I’d left anything for him, and of course I hadn’t. I’ve stopped carrying
peanuts.
Between stiffing the squirrels and
knowing the coyotes are being euthanized it’s a bad time for an animal lover
here. Last hope is the rabbits, whose
babies start to appear about this time of the year. They’re prey animals, of
course, but they’ll have to carry the ball; the rest of us are sidelined.
