Ron's Big Life Update - December 2003

Well, it's not Christmas yet, and Hanukkah is still going on, so it's still appropriate to wish everyone a happy holiday!

You all heard from us in October, and really not much has changed since then. I did come up with the ultimate Hanukkah gift for the Dungeons & Dragons fanatic: a 20-sided dreidel. But aside from that, and one particular patent infringement case that I looked at involving Christmas lights, where I spent two days mapping out the wiring diagrams to eight different light nets so that I'll never want to look at Christmas lights ever again, not much going on. It's just like on TV: "Patent Law And Order".

As the temperature out here heads up into the 30's and the snow cover melts, I'm reminded of an incident from this past summer. For the past two years, Margaret had been telling me about an albino squirrel that lived in our neighborhood. She said that it did all the normal evil things that little evil squirrels do (like eat whatever's in Margaret's garden), only it was completely white from its evil nose to the tip of its evil poofy tail. Well, this past summer, while I was eating breakfast and staring out the window, I got a chance to see the albino squirrel in our very own backyard. Sure enough, perfectly white all over, and it jumped around and ran across the power line and ate acorns and plotted evil just like all the other brown squirrels in the neighborhood. Cute, though! And not at all evil-looking. I got to watch him for a good ten minutes until he'd had enough of our backyard, and then he left to go be an albino squirrel in our neighbor's backyard. Naturally, I gave Margaret the full report and she approved, although with the slightly condescending look that said, "Silly New York City boy." (I first got a taste of that look when Margaret found a passage in a book describing a particular bird, "known as the Upside-Down Bird to children everywhere and adult New Yorkers.") I thought about what the white squirrel's name might be ("Earl The Squirl"?) and if his squirrel friends ever made fun of him for being completely white, and then went on my way, happy that I'd gotten to witness one of life's more interesting mutations and one of my block's more interesting fuzzy creatures.

Later that day, as I turned onto 76th Street, I noticed a flat squirrel in the right lane. Not an unusual occurrence, since 76th Street is pretty busy, except this one was white all over. Yep, it was unmistakably Earl, and he was now completely flat, with his little limbs extended outward just like you see in the cartoons when a cartoon animal expires. (I half expected to see little X's where his eyes were.) Drat.

Now as fables and tales go, I realize that this may not have the deep moral and philosophical implications of, say, The Boy Who Cried Wolf or The Littlest Giant. In fact, I'm having trouble drawing any kind of conclusion at all from The Tragedy On 76th Street. Well, maybe it's this: In the spirit of this holiday season, try to respect and admire all of the neighborhood's creatures, regardless of the color of their fur. And do what they taught you in driver's ed - aim for the brown squirrels.

Good night and God Bless,
Ron and Margaret Gerber

P.S. from Margaret: For those who are curious, The Upside-Down Bird is also known as the White-Breasted Nuthatch, it climbs on tree trunks in an upside-down position in order to get the bugs hiding in bark crevices that right-side-up birds miss.