Dawn, Saturday 10-15-11, and a black pumpkin cat glimmered protectively throughout the night in our window at the enfortressed limestone Putney. Specifically, the former Odd Fellows Hall on the 3rd floor. This stone making up the Putney was laid in 1882 and it still looks good.
It was formed in the Silurian Age, as previously noted in the raccoon news. And that was 317 to 347 M-i-l-l-i-o-n years ago.
Well preserved.
Root crops from area farmers were for sale this morning at the farmer's market. We were particularly taken with the rat-tailed beets, but we already have some beets in storage within the 317 million year old Putney. They will last well into winter, having the rugged genes to keep well.
A lonely squirrel at that early hour downtown leisurely sought a good place to bury a nut held in its mouth.
He decided on a tricky excavation between steel rays of a tree grating.
Although he did not say, he may have thought back to the still-living squirrel lore handed down to him from past generations. Squirrels are like raccoons that way.
There was a time when a squirrel seeking to bury a nut at what later became the Five Points could simply find a place in the real mud streets.
Much easier digging then. (See an upcoming SRN posting.) Native Americans built their trading posts at the eventual Five Points mostly out of wood, not of impervious millions of years old stone. Nuts went between easy wood chinks sometimes, a vestige of what today's squirrel was trying to do twixt steel rays.
But the motive has always been the same: to preserve nuts for later consumption.
Later in the day, after another invite from Joe Beringer to meet at the Steaming Cup, Joe and I sat with coffee and herbal cranberry iced-tea having another jolly time, talking and laughing. Then in a dramatic moment, an attractive woman came in and began to smile at me. She sat a table away from us. Her husband was not with her yet. This girl looked very familiar and she kept smiling at me.
I began to feel self-conscious.
When she finally got up and approached Joe from the back with a tender pat and a murmured greeting to her 'dear brother', it hit me like tons of Putney limestone.
Yes, of course. It was - of course - Sylvia Beringer Trewyn. One of Joe's sisters! Sylvia and I went to Waukesha High School together.
SYLVIA,
The definitive well-preserved creature, the one who put a beautiful cap on THE theme for today.
Oh joy!
Here, have this in lieu of a U-tube video of our beloved choir director Zel Monlux and the 1953 and + and minus Waukesha A capella choir.
There is no such thing as a recording of that, to our knowledge, but the music and Zelma lives in our hearts.
