Mostly Anecdotal

My backyard is not much more than a small patch of grass, a patio, a favorite chair, and a forest of scrub oak. I’m sitting, book in hand (Kindle®), reading. My constant backyard companions, the birds, are sitting on the branches that form the canopy that shades my favorite reading spot. They are keeping me company.

I hear the branches right above me rustle, and look up to see what bird has stopped to visit. Instead I see a squirrel. I believe it is the same squirrel I’ve seen before skittering under the shed, but now he is in the top of the trees looking down at me. For just a moment, I’m worried that this is his cousin—brought in from out of town to do a hit—and that I am the target. I have, after all, recently cleaned out the shed upsetting the winter store he has hidden there. He looks me over carefully and then deciding to give me a break—runs across the tree tops to the east and my neighbor’s yard.

I return to my book, Matrimony by Joshua Henkin.

Author’s often use their novels as vehicles to address their pet peeves, and that’s okay with me. I like such asides. I believe the character is being used, but not unfairly.

Here is an exchange between Julian and Mia.

But before she could answer him, he had moved from philosophy to English usage. He was listing the idioms he used to get wrong. He’d said “no holes barred” instead of “no holds barred” and “deep-seeded” instead of “deep-seated.” “It’s ‘home in on,’” he said, “not ‘hone in on.’ Like a homing pigeon.” Why, he wanted to know, was it “the whole nine yards” and not “the whole ten yards”? It took ten yards to get a first down. Or “have your cake and eat it, too.” It was no trick, he said, to have your cake and eat it. The real trick was in reverse, to eat your cake and still have it. That was what the idiom should have been: “to eat your cake and have it, too.” “Or ‘long in the tooth,’” Mia said. “What does that mean?” “Old.” “But why? Do our teeth get longer as we age? Are we destined to become beavers?”

(Matrimony Kindle Edition, Location 675-681)

But that is “beside the point,” not “besides the point.” When I look up again, the squirrel is four feet away, on a low branch, and staring at me. I try to engage him in conversation, but he finds nothing I say worthy of a response. He turns, and then looks back as if he is giving me one more chance. He waits a moment longer, and then scampers up the tree, and from there along Canopy Boulevard to the west.