A few days before spring break I ended up in Boston Common in the middle of the afternoon. This was when it was just starting to get warmer; it was the first properly sunny day for what felt like months (probably was) and the T had gotten stuck at the MGH Station so I decided to walk home through the Commons. I was about halfway through when I noticed that these two particular trees had about twenty squirrels swarming around them with people feeding them. Because we don’t have squirrels in Bermuda and I think they’re fucking adorable I stopped to look and kicked myself for not saving some of the bread from my sandwich. There was this one guy feeding them peanuts out of his hand: they were obviously used to him.
He's an interesting man, in a mundane sort of way. At first glance he looks perfectly normal, bundled up in a blue coat and beanie, just a guy who feeds the squirrels when he can. If you look at him a little longer though, you can see he’s a little rough around the edges: the coat is worn, the beanie a bit dirty, the jeans a little frayed. His beard and moustache look like they’ve been trimmed in the past week but you can see where the once clean edges are beginning to blur. I don’t think he’s homeless; he didn’t smell, and he was a bit too well kept, never mind that he had enough money to give squirrels a bag of peanuts and some blueberries on a regular basis, but he is a bit ragged around the edges.
I had been standing there for a while when he just started talking, about how one of them was malnourished so he gave him specifically a bunch of blueberries. These weren’t the bunch he usually fed, he said, but his friend that did was sick, so he was feeding them and then going down to the river to feed his usual ones. Apparently the tree we were standing in front of was home to about thirty squirrels during the winter and they were all snuggled on top of each other inside. I asked him why so many and he said that there used to be several trees around this one, but that the park hadn’t planted new trees when the old ones had died. He was very passionate about this; there used to be a row of trees planted near the Frog Pond that all fell down and were never replanted, and a tree that was planted in memory of Anne Frank, that people yanked on and otherwise vandalized until it died, that they never replanted either. He’d sent the park several emails on the subject and was frustrated that they’d never done anything. The upshot of all these trees not being replanted was that the squirrels had fewer and fewer places to live; there were only so many trees that had space.
It’s interesting; I got the impression he didn’t have much but he still set aside time and money to feed the squirrels. Sometimes I wish I had that much compassion.
