The Columnist Manifesto

For the past couple of weeks, a slightly camouflaged spectacle has been going on in My Neighborhood Park. It's sort of a squirrel convention, or perhaps a smorgasbord. I wish I oculd have captured this in a single photo, but I'm no nature photographer. Trust me, in your field of vision you could see 10, 12, 15 squirrels sitting there stuffing their faces with acorns.


It's somewhat unusual to see so many of them, sitting and eating with such grim determination. B says this means it's going to be a long, cold winter -- a sort of November squirrel version of Groundhog Day.


I'm reading an excellent book called Displaced Persons, by Joseph Berger, a memoir by a child of Jewish refugees who immigrated to the U.S. after WWII. Berger's parents grew up in Poland and survived the holocaust by going to Soviet Russia after the partitition of Poland in 1939, where they worked at hard labor and never had enough to eat in a country wracked by wartime shortages. They were poor even before the war, and it seems as though the first 30 years of their lives were all about food -- scraping together enough to eat, and being hungry virtually all the time. And it seemed like they spent a lot of time thinking about food.

If I'm hungry for a couple of hours, that's a lot. It's almost unimaginable to me what it would be like to feel hungry most of the time, for years on end. But throughout most of human history, hasn't life for most people mostly been all about getting food? And isn't it that way now for a lot of the world?