Day-Maker

So this made my day. As I took my walk early this morning, I came across a man pawing at the bark of a tree trunk while looking up into its branches. My initial thought was “Ok, this is a scene to pass quickly, before he notices me.” The man looked like someone right out of Hollywood’s Central Casting. He was wearing a “wife-beater” undershirt, both arms were tattooed and his dark stubble of facial hair made him perfect for the role of a villain or a tow truck driver you didn’t want to meet on a lonely road. But when I took a second glance, I noticed a squirrel crawling down towards the man’s clawing hands. Closer. Closer. Until he was in the man’s grasp. The man scratched the squirrel’s ears the way one would a puppy. Then the squirrel stepped off the tree trunk and into the man’s cupped hands. At that point the man noticed me watching and said hello, which startled the squirrel, and it jumped back onto the tree trunk and scurried up into the branches, out of sight. I said, “Well, that’s something I don’t see every day.”  Then the man told me the rest of the story.  He had rescued the squirrel when it was very young. It had fallen out of a tree and the man’s children had handled it, causing its mother to abandon it. So the man took the squirrel in and nursed it with a baby’s bottle and fed it peanut butter and took care of it until it was old enough to fend for itself. But the other squirrels detected something different about it and would not interact with it as they would other squirrels, so the man built the squirrel, whom he originally named McFeisty, a log cabin home in a tree in his yard. He told me that while he was nursing the squirrel, and as it got older, it would actually groom the man. It would chew on his fingernails until they were finely trimmed, and if it nibbled too closely and hurt the man’s fingers, the squirrel would crawl up the man’s arm to his ear and gently nibble it and make sounds that the man interpreted as attempt to apologize and comfort him. The man said the squirrel is also a Fruit Loops addict. “He’s up to eighteen a day. He’s got it bad,” he said. As the man related all this to me, McFeisty, whom the man renamed B. B. Squirrel, “Because he is my B. B,” had crawled back into his arms and playfully circled his shoulders. Then B.B. jumped back on the trunk, climbed back up into the branches, leapt to the rooftop next door and went on to start its daily routine – whatever that was. Nothing about this was expected, not the squirrel’s behavior nor the man’s. Who would have thought that such a rough looking character would have showed such tender care to such a vulnerable creature? Lesson relearned: You simply cannot judge people by their appearance, and sometimes, not even squirrels.