Squirrel tale

So, the pal formerly know as RAB twittered this tweet earlier today:

I just saw the most remarkable thing in Washington Square Park: a squirrel carrying an entire slice of pizza up a tree.
— Richard Bensam (@richardbensam) July 9, 2013

And then followed it up with this:

Squirrel was carrying the slice by its crust, went by too fast for a picture.
— Richard Bensam (@richardbensam) July 9, 2013

Now, I'm not trying to play Can You Top This? in regard to the preternatural abilities of new York squirrels, but I do have a squirrel story that I have wanted to share for a long time, and this gives me the opportunity.

I'm sitting in Central Park, sometime during high school. I watch a squirrel dragging a paper grocery bag along the ground. The bag isn't flattened, it's still mostly open; the squirrel looks like nothing more than a cartoon burglar with a giant loot sack. The squirrel crosses the grass in front of my bench and heads to a tree, a tall skinny tree, as I remember, with no low limbs; he climbs about twenty-five feet up the trunk, still carrying the bag with him, until he reaches a open knot or bole or whatever those holes are called.

The squirrel climbs in the hole and starts pulling the bag in after him. The bag is bigger than the hole, so the squirrel pulls the edges of the open end in, side by side, so now the bottom of the bag is kind of ballooning out of the hole. It starts being pulled in little by little, and then just stops. For a few seconds, all is still and silent.

Then the tree starts to shake. And all of a sudden, the bag explodes as the squirrel comes blasting out of the hole right through it. Hot on his tail is another squirrel, screeching and chattering up a storm. The first squirrel flees down the trunk of the tree and tears off; the second squirrel chases him halfway down the trunk, yelling after him, cursing up a storm in squirrel-talk, and waving a tiny little fist.

To this day I still believe I was witness to what might have been the Great Nut Robbery of the Twentieth Century, had our bushy-tailed Raffles not miscalculated and come when his intended victim, apparently the Joe Pesci of squirreldom, was at home. And, my hand to god (as Alan King would say), all of this is 100% true.

Except for the tiny little fist part.

What are you lookin' at?