A lazy, unimaginative wish

A white squirrel used to live in relative proximity to my yard. The last couple of years I’d see him once every few weeks or so, but the last week I’ve seen him much more frequently. I’m not sure what changed for him, but now he hops curiously or scurries through my yard a few times a day and I’ve named him Charlie. Honestly, I can’t tell if he has testicles, so he could be Carol, but I don’t think he’ll care one way or the other.

For years now, whenever I see an albino squirrel, I always make a wish. When or why I started this, and whether I heard about it from someone else or if it’s even a thing to make a wish on a white squirrel, I have no idea. But myth-making is nothing if not a worthwhile endeavor. After all, lawn gnomes came out of it (eventually).

Still, I suppose that it’s a lot of pressure for Charlie to grant my wishes, but some of them, the smaller ones, have come true. So when today I saw him hopping by, and I thought to myself, “I hope everything works out for everyone.”

What a lazy, unimaginative wish that is to make. I hope everything works out. I guess I’ve been seeing him too often, the wish opportunities coming too fast now for my desires and creativity to keep up. And so far, none of this week’s wishes have come true.

In fact, earlier this week I lost $325, which wasn’t part of my money wish at all. But that’s what I get for making a money wish. That’s a selfish wish, and I wouldn’t expect Charlie to have any interest in granting it. After all, he has no interest in money, and it seems to me that the wishes most likely to be granted by a squirrel would be the ones he could relate to, ones where we each have some common ground.

I could wish that he and his friends would stop eating my tulips, which every year pop up first and are therefore the first thing to be eaten by the rabbits and squirrels, but that’s a wish against him, not for me or “us.” It doesn’t set the right tone.

Charlie will regularly jump up on the bird bath outside my back porch and sip water, then lay down on a nearby log in the sun. I think that one wish I could make to satisfy both of us is for it to rain about every 5 days or so, just enough to keep the bird bath hydrated, so that I don’t have to go out and do it. That would help me, Charlie, and the birds, plus I bet it would be good for everyone’s garden, not to mention the farmers. That would be a pretty good wish for Charlie to grant.

And just think, if it was a wish that he could grant the world over, it actually might be the kind of wish that would help everything work out better for a lot of people. Not everything for everyone, but drought and a lack of food is a worldwide problem. Nearly a billion people around the world don’t have enough to eat. So if Charlie could grant the rain thing, he’d be doing everyone a solid.

In the meantime I’m going to try to think of some things I could wish for that each of us might have in common. Maybe a really good sandwich, but one that is big enough that there’s a tiny bit left over, enough for Charlie to get a good meal. I’ll have my fill and toss it out the back door for him, and about the time he finishes up and needs a drink, he’ll thank me and it will start to rain.