My Family Is In Competition with a Homeless Woman and a Vietnam Veteran -- Dianne Pearce

I now believe in zombies, because Frampton comes alive.

My local park (across the street from my house) is a cemetery. My family (which includes me) walks our dog there twice a day. We keep him on leash, and on the path/road, no peeing on great Uncle Fred or anything like that.

This cemetery is full of squirrels. In fact, if you are a squirrel, it is the place to be. It is squirrel heaven. It is quiet, lush, green, very tree-ed. Southern California weather. If I hadn't already planned to come back as a sea otter on the Pacific Coast, I'd come back as a squirrel right in this cemetery.

We not only walk our dog there, we also bring peanuts for the squirrels (raw, in the shell). I expect, if we were able to stop bringing peanuts, we could probably retire on all the extra not-buying-peanuts money we'd have. We are not able to stop.

We've been doing this for about 1.5 years. Every day. Twice a day.

The squirrels seem to be waiting for us some days, and I tease my fourteen-year-old daughter that the squirrels call her Mrs. Peanut-Lady, and call me Mrs. Peanut-Lady's Mom, and call my husband Mr. Mrs. Peanut-Lady's Mom. The squirrels call us those names in very high-pitched voices with a slight New York City accent.

In the past three months we have had encroachment on our territory as the sole feeders of the squirrels. One encroacher is the man in the large black van that has a "Disabled Veteran" license plate on it, and stickers about Vietnam Veterans for Biden: my kinda guy driving that van. The man looks Native American, and appears to have Parkinson's, or some other tremor situation going on, and he is friendly, and we occasionally make jokes about how awful Trump is. 

I like that guy, but, dammit, he's feeding our squirrels. Peanuts, seeds, crackers, old bread, whatever he seems to have on him. He doesn't get out of the van, so he is pretty much just feeding in the one spot, while we are able to wander the whole of the cemetery (as long as we, my rule, stay on the grass, and be respectful to the folks sleeping there), so we have an advantage of range, but he usually parks in the most densely-populated squirrel area, which, wow, we just wish he wouldn't. 

His van is black, and doesn't have windows so I can see in back, so I don't know if he is living in there, but he usually has his wife with him, and I assume they live indoors and are just very very old and immobile. 

The woman in the truck, however, is definitely homeless.

In fact, the cemetery never closes, and I suspect that sometimes she sleeps in the truck and in the cemetery. I know she sleeps in the truck. I assume sometimes it is parked in the cemetery.

The truck-lady avoids us. If we are there at the same time as her she goes whichever way we are not. She looks at the squirrels and the ground, and not much else. She dresses like a gas station attendant from 1972. She looks white and slightly too tanned. She looks very boyish in dress and haircut and physique. She feeds the squirrels nuts rarely. She usually feeds them little bits of bread or cracker. We have a tendency to toss a squirrel several peanuts at once (we get our peanuts much much cheaper than you would expect, and at Asian markets), because we are kindly, generous people, and also because we have trouble getting a peanut to the squirrel on the first toss because we have terrible wimpy arm muscles, and bad aim, and squirrels have eyesight no better than my own. I should be tossing them progressive-lensed glasses.

(On a side note, sometimes we accidentally bounce the peanuts off the squirrels' wee little heads; they do not seem to mind, and still seem to have trouble finding the nut.)

The truck lady judiciously throws one treat to one squirrel, Because she doesn't have many things to throw, is what I think.

And I know she is homeless because the bed of her truck is full of all her worldly possessions, and on the rare times SoCal rain is coming I have seen her painstakingly take it all out, lay it on the path, fold it up as tiny as possibly, and neatly shove it into the cab's back seat. It barely fits.

I guess I kinda get the veteran feeding the squirrels: he is not so mobile, and he is pretty darn old by the looks of him, and pretty tremor-ridden. It's a delightful activity for someone with not a lot of mobility or not a lot going on, socially.

We fall into the second category. Between driving the child a hellishly long (by Los Angeles standards) drive to-and-from school each day, and all the other malarky we get up to trying to earn a buck, we're pretty computer-bound. And we're an introverted bunch, and we have no friends... here. 

The truck lady is definitely introverted and low on social activities. I expect she is also dangerously low on funds.

Which led me, over and over, to wonder why all of us are giving our money to a bunch of nearsighted squirrels. 

We don't need to do it. None of us seem to be doing it for performative reasons. We have some affection for the squirrels, but it's a one-way relationship; even the one we named Teddy only shows his chubby face occasionally, and sometimes he chooses what the veteran has over what we have. Today the one with the spot on his ear, that we named, of course, Fido, chewed the truck lady's rice cracker right in our faces, ignoring the beefy, protein-packed peanut we'd tossed him. WTH?

So, why do we do it?

This is my conclusion on the matter:

We need to give something to someone or something. We need to give.

Yes, I think we all have a desire to be a helper, to be a person who helps out, who gives, who takes care of. Some of us like this more than others, and, in my family, our feeding the squirrels also fits in nicely with my family's dog-walking agenda. But it also allows us to fit a little bit of kindness and care-taking into our busy days. And even the truck lady, who I expect has enormous needs financially, is willing, and, it seems, eager and bent on sharing what little she has with something beyond herself.

What does that have to do with writing? 

Are you a squirrel? No? Then don't ask me! Go find your own nut!

Nah, I'm just kidding.

My own take on it is that though writing is often viewed through a lens of being performative, by authors and their audiences, for me, it is much more often because I have something that I think some reader somewhere might be able to find useful, and I want to give the story, as a gift, no strings attached, but I hope the reader likes it, gets some gift from it. If you want to give a gift, and all you have is your drum to play, you play your drum. Right? and hope the hearer likes it.

And so, in the park... er, cemetery... across the street, we're not really in competition: all squirrel feeders are welcome, and welcomed with open paws by the voracious little beasties.  There are more than enough hungry squirrels for all of us, and then some, to give to. And none of those squirrels seem to care how much, or how little, we have to give, but all seem exceedingly pleased to get it. It is a joy above most other pleasurable things to make something outside of yourself happy.