I sat on a bench in the park watching a squirrel chase another squirrel. Barking and squabbling, they raced clockwise around a small swing hanging nostalgically from the branch of a pecan tree. When they froze and changed directions, they kicked up a cloud of dust from the patch of dry ground rubbed grassless by swingers swinging. Up and around the trunk of the tree, then along the low branch from which the swing hung down, they played tag and coochie-coo simultaneously.
Overhead a blue jay cried. A grackle on the ground responded. I looked up and a green pecan fell. The blue jay called out again, and the grackle returned its call. Back and forth they conversed, taking turns precisely. The blue jay’s squawk could be short or long, but the grackle always waited until the blue jay had finished before beginning his gravelly reply.
I thought to myself, “Isn’t it wonderful to be living in Brazil?” By “living in Brazil” I meant “living in Houston”, but with pecan trees instead of mangroves, and with chattering squirrels instead of marmosets. The raucous shriek of the blue jay, a modern-day pterodactyl, pierced the fabric of my daydream and sent me sailing in another dimension. “Isn’t it wonderful,” I thought to myself as I fed the hungry grackle, “to be living in pre-historic times?”