Thoreau called chipmunks “striped squirrels,” and although he wrote several times in Walden about seeing regular squirrels, he mentioned a striped squirrel only once, and that wasn’t about seeing one, only hearing it, which tells you how shy they are.
People like to go down slides. Socrates was a person. Ergo—
On the back cover is Wishner’s photograph of Lady Cheltenham. She is down in the grass, at the edge of protective vegetation, perched on a piece of quartzite slightly larger than herself. She is looking straight into the camera. One front paw is raised. Wishner’s caption is, “Lady Cheltenham alone.”
She reads a couple of pages to her mother every night, trying to make her see how wonderful it is. Her mother swears she’s fascinated, then falls asleep.
It was in the Strand bookstore that she found it. She wasn’t even looking. She spotted the spine: Eastern Chipmunks. It raised its tail and tried to zip away, but she grabbed it. The subtitle was maybe the most beautiful phrase she had ever read: Secrets of Their Solitary Lives. It was a hardcover book published by the Smithsonian Institution, but the Strand was selling it used for only seven dollars.
“No one can say when the appropriate genes appeared that led the first solitary chipmunk on its road to independence, but that those genes have been serviceable is obvious.” The book was published in 1982. There’s very little online about Wishner, but Mary Washington College, which is now called the University of Mary Washington, lists him as a professor emeritus. He’s probably in his seventies.
For a few days she took notes and photographed the pigeons that congregated outside her window and on the sills of the apartment building next door. But she couldn’t learn to tell them apart, and they never did anything interesting. Wishner says that when he was a child he noticed chipmunks but was “too young and preoccupied to enjoy a systematic curiosity about their lives.” Maybe that’s her problem. She’s thought about writing him a letter, but doesn’t want to intrude on his solitary life. “A chipmunk with social tendencies appearing in a present-day population is sure to get clobbered.”
One of her father’s word games is snowball sentences, in which each word has one more letter than the word preceding it. She is proud of the one she sent him in her last message: I am one who’s quite liking Wishner, Lawrence—nominally biochemist, nonetheless impressively multitalented.
How to become less young is obvious, if slow. But how to become less preoccupied—this is the mystery.
The scientific name for the chipmunk is Tamias striatus, which means “striped steward.” Steward of seeds, maybe. She likes that. “Gutrune was able to carry an average of thirty-five whole sunflower seeds at a time.” This is in her cheeks. The photograph is adorable. “There can be no doubt that chipmunks do not store food to satisfy their immediate needs, but rather because they are genetically programmed to do so, and that this instinctive characteristic has enabled them to remain independent for 25 million or so years.”
She wishes her mother wouldn’t fall asleep when she gets read to. She says she’s interested, but she’s an actor.
She lies in her nest where only the birds can see her and turns again to the back flap. Wishner sits at his picnic table in black and white, his beloved domain behind him. He looks patient and thoughtful. He could be called Tamias tamias striatus, steward of chipmunks.
2006
11:56 p.m., May 9, 2006
Dear Mette,
I hope you are well. Please say hello to your mother for me.
I’m glad you’re finding the algebra puzzle interesting. Here’s a hint: when we multiply both sides by (x−y), what do we have to be careful about?
I enjoyed your substitution cipher. I noticed you used letter-frequency ranking as your encoder. Maybe that was an unstated puzzle within the puzzle? By the way, I wonder if you’ve noticed that the Epimenides paradox is not logically complete. There is no necessary contradiction if we assume his statement to be false, because he is claiming that all Cretans are liars. There could of course be truth-telling Cretans that just don’t happen to be him. A sounder version of this paradox is the one ascribed to Eubulides: T ntf stds, “Zktv B tn stdbfc fxz bs t wbu.” (You’ll be able to solve this immediately if you guess what encoder I used as a quick and lazy way of ensuring I was including all possible letters.)
I was also quite impressed by your snowball sentence! Here is a variant form I just thought of that perhaps could be called a snowball palindrome:
I do not like dense people wrongly saying words thus: for “me,” “I.”
There aren’t many options for beginning and ending this form, but once you have a frame such as the one above, the challenge is to expand the middle:
I do not like dense people wrongly subbing always words thus: for “me,” “I.”
One could classify snowball palindromes into two groups, peaked and truncated. The first above is peaked, with one seven-letter word at the center, whereas the second is truncated, with two seven-letter words next to each other. Can you add a peak to the second sentence?
By the way, I’ve written another one of those whatevers. It probably won’t mean much to you, but anyway, here it is:
Data Set: Haunted House
In an attic box, I found a memorandum book my father kept when he was in graduate school.
He wrote simultaneously from the front and back, so that entries converge toward the middle.
I fill notebooks the same way.
On the last page is written:
Dates to remember:
September 6: Margaret’s birthday
October 26: Engagement
April 29: Ring
These lines are crossed out, and immediately below them is written:
May 2: Imogen’s birthday
June 12:
