I’ll get right to the central question.
Is it okay to watch squirrels chase each other around your backyard on a Sunday morning rather than sleep off a hangover?
Because that’s what happens in my house.
And I’m not sure I’m cool with it.
I recently decided to confront the issue.
What are we doing here? I asked my wife.
She gave me a confused look.
I get that a lot from her.
I mean, really, I continued. What is going on?
“What could you possibly be talking about now?” she asked me.
Look at us! I said. What is wrong with us?
It was about eight-thirty on a Sunday morning.
We were sitting downstairs in our robes and slippers, having coffee, looking out across our back porch and into the woods.
It was our standard weekend morning ritual.
Our house backs up to a wooded area, beyond which is a golf course.
It’s nice and quiet back there.
And we get a variety of wildlife that passes through.
The woods, our porch, and our yard seem to attract all kinds of animals.
Which can be highly entertaining.
One Saturday afternoon, a deer walked right up to our living room window, pushed its nose onto the glass, and started watching a football game with us.
And it stood there, watching, for, like, five minutes.
And it’s not just the deer.
My wife has this great picture of a fat groundhog doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same window.
Sports are big in our town.
Big enough, apparently, that even the animals like to get in on the action.
Which I find amusing
Maybe even delightful.
I’ve always been an animal lover.
No, I don’t want one living, shedding, and shitting in my house.
But, I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoy watching animals of any kind run around outside.
Especially the squirrels.
This particular morning, my wife and I had been watching about six of them fly across the treetops, moving deftly from branch to branch.
It’s incredible how they do that.
Two of them stopped not far from each other and began adding leaves and branches to separate nests that occupied the same tree.
Are they together? we wondered.
You know, like a couple.
If they were, then why the separate nests?
“Maybe that’s the guest house,” my wife offered. “They need a place for when friends visit from out of town.”
Out-of-town squirrels?
“That’s right,” she said.
And we went back and forth like this for a while.
Which is what we do most weekends.
And then it hit me right in the face.
Holy shit! I told my wife.
We’re a couple of old people.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
I’m talking about this, I said.
This is what old people do.
They watch animals in their backyards.
And they do stupid shit like give them names and create backstories for them.
Exactly as we did for the squirrels.
How did it come to this?
As a thought experiment, I asked what the twenty-five-year-old version of myself would have thought about this ridiculous weekend morning routine.
It wasn’t much of an experiment, because the answer was immediately clear.
Twenty-five-year-old Dan would not have approved.
That guy would have rolled in from the bars at about two in the morning, having hit several with friends the night before.
He’d have dragged his ass out bed around nine or ten, forced down some coffee, then gone out for a run to sweat out some of the booze.
He would have been miserable and bitched the entire way.
But he would have done it, without fail.
Then, he would have showered and gone right back out to meet the same friends for brunch, immediately downing a Bloody Mary on arrival to re-ignite the previous night’s buzz.
Several more Bloodies would have then followed until someone would’ve had the idea to go the beach.
Dan would have then gone to the beach, passed out on a towel for an hour, then gotten up to play football with his buddies or to bodysurf.
The beach would have then turned into an impromptu barbecue or dinner party at someone’s house, followed by a semi-reasonable bedtime to be back in a cockpit or simulator the following day.
That was how you spent a Sunday.
The very thought of squirrel-watching would have sent twenty-five-year-old Dan running back to the bar for a round of tequila shots.
I suddenly felt judged.
And a little ashamed.
We gotta do something about this, I told my wife.
“Relax,” she said. “It’s not like we’re one of those crazy people who puts out bird feeders.”
That was a fair point.
It was one thing to be looking out over your backyard on a Sunday morning and to observe a bunch of squirrels that happened to be running around back there.
But it was entirely another to bait said squirrels—or birds or rabbits or whatever—into one’s yard.
That was crossing a line.
The line that separates young from old.
The same was true of binoculars.
Watching the animals run around with the naked eye says nothing of one’s age or station in life.
But adding any form of magnification, like binoculars or a telescope, to make such observations, again, crosses the line.
Especially if the binoculars are accompanied by a guidebook that enables you to identify specific species.
“That’s odd,” you may say. “You don’t usually see the American Goldfinch in these parts for at least another three weeks. They should still be in Mexico.”
Yeah, I’ve got news for you if you’re that guy.
You’re old.
Or an ornithologist.
But, come on.
How many ornithologists do you know?
So, is the solution simply to return to the bars every Saturday night?
Maybe.
But I couldn’t make a habit out of it.
First, I like to sleep. A lot.
And, as I’ve learned, quality matters, perhaps even more than quantity.
Everyone knows that drunk sleep is shit.
I’ve had plenty of that in my life, and I don’t need any more.
Second, I have stuff to do.
Mornings are my most productive time, and I’d hate to waste them.
That includes weekends.
And let’s be honest.
If I were to go out booming next Saturday night the same way I did when I was in my twenties, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed until Tuesday.
I just can’t rebound the way I used to.
So, returning to our central question, Is it okay to watch squirrels on a Sunday morning?
I say yes.
But with caveats.
No baiting of squirrels, birds, or any other animals via feeders.
If they show up in your yard, great.
But that’s their call, not yours.
Also, no binoculars.
And no guidebooks.
Making up ridiculous stories and anecdotes to explain squirrel behavior is okay.
But it cannot be done with any serious intent.
It is not okay to name the squirrels or to make any claim they have any awareness of you or connection to your yard.
“Oh, there’s Rudy again! Yes, that’s him! He loves it here. Shows up every morning. Funny he’s not with Sheila any more . . .”
Wrong.
So now it’s settled.
And I can return to my Sunday morning routine guilt-free, provided I follow the rules.
Which I will.
Even as part of me wishes
That I could be passed out on a towel
On a beach
Somewhere.