Glimpsing one’s own intellect is like seeing the bride before the service on your wedding day. It’s bad luck. It just puts a pall over the whole thing.

Case in point: I spent Thursday afternoon in the company of a top-tier Double Diamond Platinum Rewards Plus cardmember in the Close Personal Friends of Andy Ihnatko organization. We had a fantastic lunch followed by a long walk through the Public Garden.

I mentioned how unseasonably bare most of the trees were.

“They really should have budded out by now,” I observed. And as I said this, I checked my watch.

I checked my watch.

This sort of thing makes me think about all the people who have gone out and bought a $1000 whatever-it-is, just because I told them that they should.

Apart from this itchy demonstration of my nincompoopery, it really was a spectacularly good day. First of all, there was the company I was keeping. If I were free-falling 12,000 feet above the earth and I had to choose between having either a single parachute or a phone call from this particular friend at that moment…

…Well, okay: of course I’d take the parachute.

Still, let’s be fair: I’d enjoy the trip down a lot more if I had the phone call instead. I’d be guaranteed a pleasant…(processing, processing) 1 minute 5.376 seconds of conversation. With the single parachute, I’d spend my time worrying about whether the chute is going to deploy properly, are my lines going to get tangled, I don’t want to land in a crocodile put like the poor bastard in that “Faces Of Death” video…things like that.

But I digress.

Maybe it was the company, maybe it was just dumb luck, but it was just one of those days when everything clicks together supernaturally well.

We were sitting on a park bench when the subject of squirrel ankles naturally found its way into the conversation.

(Here you see why I was forced to create a separate superclass of service for friends like this one. Competition for companions like this can be fierce, and if singling them out for exclusive services makes the economy-class conversationalists feel slighted, well, blame the economy. You might also blame the intensity and frequency with which the latter group chronicles their progress in “World Of Warcraft,” but I don’t like to judge.)

“You know how squirrels can turn their claws around so that they face in either direction?” she asked.

No, I didn’t. I imagined that she was talking about opposably-retractible claws or something.

“I’ve never really looked at a squirrel hand,” I admitted. “I guess I should look it up sometime.”

And at that moment, a squirrel loped down from a tree, as if cued by another squirrel wearing a headset and scrutinizing a clipboard. It patiently hopped up onto the bench, and put its front paws on my leg.

“Oh, okay,” I said, examining the creature. “You mean how they can stand on their haunches like most mammals, but can also flip their whole feet around so that their ‘palms’ and ’soles’ are both facing towards the bark of the tree as they hang on.”

For the purposes of this blog, I’ll tell you that the squirrel then snapped me a smart little salute, doffed his miniature green wooly Irish fishing cap at the lady, and bid an adieu that was unintelligibly squeaky but which was clearly an attempt to articulate “Have a good one, Ace.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 7:25 pm and is filed under yellowtext. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.