Walden Puddle: DIVORCE, WALDEN PUDDLE STYLE

November 9, 2009, Vol. 1., No. 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS
(in scroll-down order)

THE BEARS OF WALDEN PUDDLE
by Dr. Ursula Whipple
Does a drunken bear habitually sleep it off on your lawn? Expert advice on how conduct an intervention.

DIVORCE, WALDEN PUDDLE STYLE
by the Walden Puddle Writers Uncooperative
Tommy was from Walden Puddle. Megan was from Copious Falls. Romeo and Juliet stood a better chance.

THE TALK OF WALDEN PUDDLE
Reportage from the practice field
The Walden Puddle Purple Finches prepare to meet the hated Migratory Elk of Copious Falls ... and our sports reporter cracks under the strain.

THE BEARS OF
WALDEN PUDDLE
Notes from the Field, Plus Expert Advice

by Dr. Ursula Whipple

Field notes: September 26, 2009. Louie got mean-drunk on fermented berries and took a swing at Darryl. Fortunately, he did not connect. It was the nastiest sucker-punch I've ever seen, and I've seen some bad ones on Ladies Drink Free Night at the Village Idiot. What made it so bad was that Darryl was asleep.

Fortunately, Louie's eye-hand was way off by then, and so was his sense of balance, so he landed flat on his ass. Darryl woke up and just walked away. I have enormous respect for Darryl. As a trained field biologist, I am not supposed to root, but hell, I am really glad that Louie made a damn fool out of himself.

Bears love berries. But when berries fall to the ground and ferment, they produce alcohol. This causes problems. Although bears are very large animals, they have what we scientists call a Girly Threshold of Inebriation. A mere handful of berries can souse them.

If you should see a bear, over and over again, lurching around your yard trying to open invisible garbage cans, that bear has a problem. He or she needs help. And so do you. Because that bear is in your yard.

Approach the bear in a sturdy pickup or SUV with the windows rolled up. Use a bullhorn so the bear can hear you. Have several people with you. This is not for safety reasons, because the bear can still kick all your sorry asses. It is just the way these so-called interventions are done.

In the case of a human intervention, five to ten people barge in on the person whose behavior they wish to improve ... sort of like a surprise party in hell ... and they alternately hug, kiss, bully, browbeat, and brainwash that person for hours or sometimes days, sleeping in shifts and leaving only to get coffee and snacks, until that person, just to get some sleep himself, caves and agrees to all their morally righteous demands.

Here's a tip: If you are ever the object of an intervention yourself, and your so-called friends are really pissing you off, just ask them to leave your house. If they refuse to leave, they are legally trespassing, and you can call the cops on them. I've had to do this myself, and it works very well. You lose friends that way, but you can make new friends on the Internet.

Here's a script I use when intervening with a bear. I have added exclamation points, but you don't have to shout. The exclamation points are just to remind you that bullhorns are loud. Drive up to the bear slowly. Do not cut the engine. Keep it running. Then, through the bullhorn:

Hello, Mr. or Mrs. Bear! We are your friends! We love you and care about you! It hurts us to see you screw up your life this way! We will stay with you until we make a breakthrough! We are prepared to stay with you for days! We love you! We cannot bear to see a bear as fine as you throw it all away! This may be rough on all of us emotionally! Bear with us!...

Keep talking like that through the bullhorn, assuring the bear that you love it, while also righteously attacking it for ruining its own life, and the bear will find you unbearable. It will then return to the woods.

After that, the bear will not come back to your property. You will never know if you convinced the bear to lay off the Long Island Iced Tea, but you will now be able to gather your laundry safely.

Dr. Ursula Whipple is a freelance animal behaviorist and contributing editor of Walden Puddle. Since 1990, she has lived in an abandoned cabin outside town, studying the local bear population and being studied by them in turn. Often referred to, by herself and her mother, as the "Jane Goodall of the North Woods," she has written dozens of articles and poems about bears. She shares her field notes with us twice monthly, because no scholarly journal will publish them.

DIVORCE, WALDEN PUDDLE STYLE
(from The Walden Puddle Chronicles)
892 words

by the Walden Puddle Writers Uncooperative

NOVEMBER 12, 1982

Over the centuries, little love has been lost between Walden Puddle and its neighbor, Copious Falls.

Separated by five miles of blacktop — and a black hole of enmity — the towns are bitter rivals, competing fiercely in athletics, dental hygiene, tractor pulls, pie-eating and wet T-shirt contests, and everything else that comprises the rich tapestry of life in northern New England.

The towns just flat-out hate each other.

An apocryphal tale has it that when Walden Puddle mustered a regiment of volunteers for the Union Army in 1861, the townsfolk of Copious Falls declared their allegiance to the Confederacy.

In Copious Falls, they tell the same story, but with the politics reversed.

Against this bitter backdrop, on November 12, 1982, Tommy McGoogan, quarterback of the Walden Puddle Purple Finches, ran into Megan Miller, a cheerleader for the Migratory Elk of Copious Falls High.

He ran into her while fleeing for the sidelines, pursued by a large and angry Copious Falls linebacker. As he scampered out of bounds, and out of harm’s way, he collided with Megan, who left the field on a stretcher.

He ran into her again three years later, when both were students at the state university, majoring in history. Their eyes met briefly in the college library, but briefly is all it took. They were in love.

Three days after they graduated, Tommy and Megan married. They moved far south, to Rhode Island, and began their graduate studies in history at Brown.

Though both had fellowships, and both worked twenty hours a week, their budget was always under stress. Yet they never quarreled over money or their lack of it. They were too much in love for petty distractions.

They quickly proved to be the stars of their department, and after obtaining their master’s degrees, they moved on to Harvard, where their doctoral dissertations were deemed, by the faculty adviser they jointly shared, “the most brilliant original work I have seen in the past forty years ... from anybody.”

They then moved to New Haven and Yale, whose history department had outbid Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia in a recruiting war for their signatures on a teaching contract. At Yale, their students adored them. Their colleagues, sheathing their claws for once, admired and respected them. Their department chairman felt blessed to have them.

Their lives were charmed, and they were grateful.

Poignantly, they had never gone home for the holidays. Both were orphans, and they avoided the subject of family. Tommy had been raised at the Walden Puddle Orphanatorium, while Megan’s formative years had been spent at the Copious Falls Asylum for Children Found in Baskets.

“I grew up in an orphanage,” Tommy had told Megan on their first date. He left it at that. Why elaborate, he thought, on a sad theme.

“So did I,” she said, thinking the same.

Each of them felt pain at that moment, not for themselves, but for the other. Their eyes grew dewy, and they shared their first kiss.

They never spoke of home again.

As they strolled the Yale campus hand-in-hand, on their way to classes, seminars, and meetings, students and faculty melted with affection just looking at them. They radiated an aura of boundless love.

Theirs was a marriage made in heaven.

At home one night, grading papers, Megan dropped a page on the floor and bumped her head as she retrieved it. She touched her forehead. A welt was forming.

“I’ll get some ice, honey,” said Tommy. He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with an ice bag, applying it tenderly to her brow. Just then, he saw something he had never noticed before. There was a very thin scar over Megan’s left eye.

“How did you get that, sweetheart?” he asked.

“What?”

“That little scar.”

“Oh. That. Some idiot football player ran into me when I was a cheerleader.”

“That’s weird. I ran over a cheerleader myself once, when I was playing. I would have felt awful about it, but she came from this snotty, stuck-up town that everybody hated.”

“Same here. We hated that other school. And that whole other town.”

“They even had a moronic nickname for their mascot,” said Tommy.

“Same here,” said Megan. “What did that other town call their mascot?”

“The Migratory Elk.”

Megan looked up and stared at their beautiful Tiffany lamp. They were now world-renowned historians. But they didn’t know each other’s history at all.

“And was your mascot, by any chance, the Purple Finch?” she asked.

“Was that you I pancaked?” said Tommy.

“The evidence seems compelling.”

“Are you angry? I didn’t see you.”

“Don’t be silly. It happens all the time at football games.”

They lapsed into an uneasy silence. This wasn’t about a freak sideline collision at all, and both of them knew it.

“You’re from Walden Puddle,” she finally said.

“I am. And you’re from Copious Falls.”

“I am.”

Their divorce was finalized three months later, but they continued speaking on the phone almost nightly. They were still very much in love.

“I wish you were from anywhere,” she told him. “I wish you came from the Third Circle of Hell. Anywhere but Walden Puddle.”

“I wish the same for you,” he told her. “I wish you’d crawled out from under a rock. Anywhere but Copious Falls.”

She sighed. “These talks on the phone. They hurt more than they help.”

“I know. It’s untenable.”

“We have to stop talking.”

“I know.”

“We have to make a clean break and move on.”

“I know.”

“I love you, Tommy.”

“I love you, Megan.”

“But you’re from Walden Puddle.”

“And you’re from Copious Falls.”

“Do you think we’ll ever meet again? Even once before we die?”

“I don’t know,” he said, choking back tears. “Maybe we’ll run into each other somewhere.”

THE TALK OF ................ WALDEN PUDDLE
The Walden Puddle Orphanatorium will hold a fund-raising dinner dance on the night of Saturday, November 21.

The Mnemonics, "an adequate cover band" according to their own press kit, will take requests. Original music will be provided by the Walden Puddle's own Latter-Day Andrews Sisters, whose specialty is gentle folk-rock.

“People think you can’t possibly dance to gentle folk-rock,” said Lucia Rowan, music director at the Orphanatorium. “They may be right. But we ask everybody to try.”

At Walden Puddle, we rarely editorialize, but there are times when silence is the greater folly.

There is a lovely proverb known to many cultures: “Where there is room in the heart, there is room in the home.”

Adopt an orphan.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

REMINDER ... AS IF ONE WERE NEEDED: This Saturday, November 14, at 1:00 p.m., after a bye wek, the Walden Puddle Purple Finches will play the the Migratory Elk of Copious Falls High in the 106th renewal of their bitter rivalry.

The first game between the schools, played in 1904, was won 84-0 by Copious Falls. In 1921, a reporter from the Copious Falls Socio-Economist dubbed the rivalry the “Uncivil War.” That colorfully descriptive name is used to this day.

Each year, the winning school takes home the Old Galvanized Bucket, and gets to keep it in their trophy case until the following November. The origins of the Old Galvanized Bucket reach far back into local lore ... far enough so that no one can remember what they are. Legends and tales abound. We have our favorite one here at Walden Puddle, and someday we might publish it. Cleaned up.

The Old Galvanized Bucket has never left the Copious Falls trophy case. Copious Falls now leads the series 105-0.

All 246 seats at Walden Puddle’s venerable Muckle Field have been sold out since Arbor Day. Standing room tickets will be available on the day of the game. For parents wishing to bring children, a special detachment of state police will be on hand to prevent violence, and hopefully not participate in it, as happened in 1968.

Please do not perch in tree limbs to watch the game, as many do. “If you fall out of a tree, chances are you will break something,” said Dr. Morris Halberstam, chief orthopedic surgeon at the Walden Puddle Holistic Infirmary. “You can look it up. I saw it on WebMD myself.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We assigned Billy Paterson, our volunteer sports reporter, to cover a week of football practice as the Purple Finches got ready for this year's Uncivil War. We have been unable to locate Billy for three days, but we found his notebook lying on a table in the Village Idiot.

Here are the fragments we salvaged from Billy’s week of hard work, which may, in retrospect, be what pushed him over the edge.

MONDAY 11-2

Couldn’t get there. Brake linings.

TUESDAY 11-3

Couldn't get there. Brake linings.

WEDNESDAY 11-4

Mrs. Agnes Stuart stopped by before practice with some of her wild-mushroom cobbler. Coach Router asked her to leave.

Alvis Baylor, the fleet-footed option quarterback, threw up violently while calling signals.

“Nerves, son?” Coach Router asked him.

“No, Coach, I ate some of Mrs. Stuart’s cobbler.”

“Don’t you ever do that again, young man.”

THURSDAY 11-5

Couldn't get there. Brake linings.

FRIDAY 11-6

Couldn't get there. Brake linings.

SATURDAY 11-7

Couldn't get there. Brake linings.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The rest of Billy’s notes were too wet to decipher. We’ll see you at Muckle Field on Saturday the 14th.

Wear purple!

Go, Finches!

NEXT POST: November 26, 2009

FEATURING: "The Rise and Fall of the Rev. Alvin Bisonnette," an uplifting tale in a downbeat way, arriving just in time for the generally downbeat holiday season. The saga begins on July 28, 1981, facedown in a bar in New York City. It then spans the continent, reaching as far west as the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and as far north as Walden Puddle, where to this day ... deep in the heart of the Rev. Alvin Bisonnette ... the struggle between Good and Evil continues. (Lay the points on Evil.)

THE BEAR FACTS: Dr. Ursula Whipple loves bears. "But not all of them realize that," she says. "That's why I plug 'em in the ass with a tranquilizer dart." Exciting reportage from the field.

BONUS ITEM: In "The Talk of Walden Puddle," a few people finally talked to us. We present highlights from our conversations with the Rev. Alvin Bisonnette and Ms. Priscilla Whipple, the delightfully spunky mother of Dr. Ursula Whipple.