The Drama of the Gifted Squirrel

It was one of those mornings—sunny, open, medium warm—that can only be described as joyous. Sure, I had things to do, like arranging a few more pages of a book due out this summer devoted to St. Paul Saints baseball memorabilia. 

There were dishes in the rack to be put away, laundry to be done—I was feeling the need of a  clean pair of jeans—and yet, before all else, I felt it imperative to take a look at the daily Wordle.

I may be among the last people in the world to catch wind of this brief and easy word game that can be accessed by anyone with a New York Times digital subscription. The idea is simplicity itself: figure out a five-letter word by placing letters more or less arbitrarily into a matrix. Once you've placed your letters in the top line, you hit "enter," and any letters in the right place turn green, while a letter included in the word, but in a different position, will turn gold. You've got six tries, descending line by line, to get the word right.

It becomes progressively easier, of course, as some letters are eliminated and others find their correct position.  But there will always be an element of luck involved, too.

The inescapable role played by luck struck me with force a week or two ago, when, after entering two combinations of five letters, I had correctly determined that the last four in the mystery word were A, T, C, and H—a lucky feat in itself. The word that came to mind at that point was "watch," and I was about to enter the missing W, when another word occurred to me: latch. Pausing to reconsider my entry, I added match, catch, hatch, and patch to the pool of likely alternatives. Clearly it would be a matter of luck whether I got the correct answer on my third, fourth, fifth, or sixth try, or not at all.

I hear tell that some Wordle enthusiasts use the same word to open each day's contest. I have found that one of the pleasures of the game is choosing a different opening word every day, depending upon the mood of the morning, or sheer whimsy. The initial word ought to consist of common letters, of course, and it probably ought to include two vowels.  But you can see that to start the day with STEAM or STEAL would strike a very different note from starting it with CEDAR or CHAOS.  And how about ROAST?

Aside from the challenge of the game itself, a second pleasure is watching the letters flip from white to green or gold (or gray, if the chosen letter isn't in the mystery word) after you hit "enter." They don't instantaneously change, but roll from one  color to the other, like the tiles in Wheel of Fortune

Once the Wordle challenge had been met, and I'd set various household machines in motion, I knew it was time to get out into the day. The task I hit upon was to drive out to the Wild Bird Store in Minnetonka to buy the metal base required to move our bird-feeder farther away from the house, in hope that it would then be beyond the leaping distance of the very athletic gray squirrel who regularly hurls himself off the roof of our dining room, landing with a thud on top of our bird-feeder.

But the minute I opened the door, I saw that a box had been delivered, and I knew what was inside it: two books by the German novelist Peter Handke that I'd agreed to review for a literary magazine. The box itself was quite nice, unlike those shapeless gray plastic packages so many shippers use, and the books inside were even nicer, and it struck me immediately that a new day had dawned in the world of book jacket design. Probably quite some time ago.

I had been thinking about book covers, because I'd just finished reading That Awful Mess on Via Merulana by the Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda, first published in 1957. Gadda is considered the Italian Joyce, though he's much more fun to read. I caught wind of him decades ago while reading Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium,  where Calvino refers to Gadda's style as "macaronic." Now, decades later, having read Gadda's masterpiece, I can see why. I have a copy of the first American edition—sans dust jacket—and I used to say to myself, every time I noticed it on the shelf, "I'll never read that." Now I have. No sooner had I done so than I went down into the basement to hunt up my copy of Gadda's other distinguished novel, Acquainted with Grief. (Not that I'm going to read it any time soon. But who knows?)

Why I hung on to that book for so many years I have no idea. But there is was, dust jacket at all. The American edition came out in 1969, and it reminded me immediately of other books from that era, including Andrea Caffi's A Critique of Violence and Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation, perhaps the ugliest book ever designed. Serifs were very big in those days. Just compare these two covers, one from 1970, the other from 2022.

(Incidentally, you can read an in-depth essay on book cover design, and especially the recent re-branding of Jonathan Franzen's backlist titles, here.)

Out at the Wild Bird Store I selected the piece of hardware I needed, with the help of the sales clerk, who pointed out that the devise I was holding in my hand wasn't designed to support an eight-foot pole.

 I picked up a few bottles of cheap white wine around the corner at Trader Joe's, where the sales clerk, who hails from Devon, England, informed me that she was thoroughly enjoying the warm weather, but had not yet packed away her winter clothes.

"I don't want to jinx it," she said. 

I returned home and begin my spring handyman project.

Can a squirrel jump that far? I doubt it.

All went well. I got out the drill, selected some old screws from a jar, screwed down the base, and moved the pole roughly four feet farther from the house. It was so warm on the deck that I took off my hat and jacket. It was heaven.

And the smells of spring were in the air.

Note: Some readers may be racking their brains trying to figure out why the title of this entry sounds so familiar. They may have read, at some time in the past, The Drama of the Gifted Child by the German psychoanalyst Alice Miller. She doesn't have much to say about squirrels, but she does feature one of Peter Handke's early novels, A Moment of True Feeling, as a classic expression of the lasting effects of repressive early childhood education.