Rob S. Friedman
September 2021
A Birthday Note for You, Son
I watched a gray squirrel outside my office window. It chose a laurel tree to build a wintering nest.
Perhaps you might find a way to tell me, though I no longer sense the world as you do, why the fading laurel and not the still-vibrant sugar maple, whose full branches stretch westward and would shield it from view, or even the light-hued oak, as rich with acorns as the laurel is with gnarled limbs and branches?
It’s the sort of question that no one has asked me since your why years — why is she crying; where is he running to? I dream. Does the cat? From the back seat, on the highway — who’s at the head of the line?
I wondered then why it mattered to you, such mundane happenstances of seeming vital import. I realize now how each question was a leafed twig gnawed into utility, a stem that added tensile strength to your own wonder-nest, and how sweetly it has circled back to mine.
Rob S. Friedman 