Canyonlands National Park, Utah: Returning from a camping trip, on her way home to Marin county (north of San Francisco), Dixie Goldsby discovered a stowaway.

In the back of the Honda, Chipmonk #1344 was contentedly feasting on a low-carb protein bar.

When Dixie arrived, she contacted WildCare, a wildlife rehabilitation center based in San Rafael. WildCare investigation determined that Chipmonk #1344 was male, healthy, chowing down in preparation for hibernation, and needed to get home … somehow.

Enter pilot Ray Romano.

Ray offered to fly Chipmonk #1344 back to Utah, accompanied by WildCare board member Jan Wild — that girl is just wild! — and off they soared in Ray’s light aircraft. High winds and Utah turbulence tossed the aircraft, creating a sense of excitement and adventure, and blew them into Arizona, where Ray and Jan and Chipmonk #1344 spent the night; and the next day the aircraft touched down near Canyonlands National Park.

By this time, a media circus had assembled. There, amid flashbulbs adequate to document the voyages of Mick Jagger, Chipmonk #1344 was picked up by a chauffer from the National Park Service.

Chipmonk #1344 found his 1400-trip quite fun, and he especially liked the protein bar. But now he’s returned to his burrow in his own tree, and sends his warmest regards to all his new friends and acquaintences.

But after all, winter is a-coming. Time to settle down.

Henrietta, Texas, 1953: The television show “Winky Dink and You” was a big hit. I bugged my mom until she sent for the magic screen and crayons. On Saturday morning, you stuck the screen on the television, then drew from dot to dot, drawing for example a ladder which saved Winky Dink from the bad guys.

Out in our back yard, my dog Bullet was largely ignored. The television was pure magic. Weekdays after school Howdy Doody and Pinky Lee cavorted until godawful country music and boring weather reports. Saturday mornings, Boston Blackie, Superman, and Winky Dink paraded in sequence.

Bullet, whose heart beat with love, was forgotten.

I am making no excuse. I have none.

When we’d moved into our little house in the north of town, my mother bought aluminum siding in a pale green. I see Bullet against that green, nosing about the back yard, peering through the fence. Laundry day was big for Bullet, because I helped my mother hang clothes on the clothesline. Lots of company, for a while.

I was in charge of feeding Bullet, and in my minds eye can still see my mother doing it. I made a rope for a Cub Scout merit badge. Then Bullet helped me test the rope. I wonder now: was there any other time in my life that I played with him?

Eventually, I talked my mom into letting Bullet run loose around the neighborhood. Or maybe I just left the gate open. This gave him more to do; he could roam around.

When my mother the nurse married Doctor Strickland, we moved to larger quarters, and Bullet retired to a new, larger, fenced back yard. He helped me to build a trapeze. He helped me attempt to throw knives to stick into a tree. He visited while I read Dracula, old gun catalogs, and Rosicrucian literature in the back yard.

At fourteen and a half, I got my license and bought a green 1951 Chevrolet. I used to take Bullet riding with me. He loved sticking his head out the window, and didn’t mind waiting if I went into the stores downtown. That is, until one day at school, when Marie Spikes commented on my habit of including Bullet, “What’s the matter?” she said. “Can’t you find a girlfriend?”

It shames me to say it, but that was the end of the rides for Bullet.

I did get a girlfriend, and later another car, and in due time drove that car to college. A couple of years later, on a visit, I asked my mother why Bullet was walking so stiffly.

“He’s old,” she said. “He’s got arthritus.”

I petted him, and he looked at me with his eternal, loving brown eyes. Always a constant. My mother said he had lots of pain. Since Doctor Strickland had a drug cabinet, now and then she gave Bullet shots of morphine, or something like that.

“Sometimes he comes and asks for a shot,” my mother told me.

I just stared at her.

Two weeks later, after finals at school, I visited again.

Bullet was gone.

He’d grown ill, and they’d put him down. I hadn’t even known it. I was hurt, and angry that I’d not been told. He was my dog, I thought, in spite of eternal neglect throughout my entire life. I fussed and complained. Then I went back to school, and, caught up again in my new life, again forgot about Bullet, my dog.

Forgot about him? Then why, forty years later, do I miss him so?

Evolution isn’t only for the birds. Artforms also come and go, develop, mutate, expand, reach dead ends, or evolve into something new.

The short essay. I think that means spelling out an opinion, or writing about something as if you know what you’re talking about. Do we really know? Maybe. Maybe not.

Once upon a time, cuneaform writing evolved, apparently to keep records of how much grain was stored, then perhaps adapted to sending messages. Generally this would involve land, money, or women, most likely. At the time, hired guns called scribes were the only ones who could either read it, or inscribe it.

But with the invention of moveable type, things changed.

The possession of writing by certain people was a power tool. Writing evolved over and over again. The technology of the times were different alphabets (pictoral, syllabic), including numeral systems (Roman, Arabic), and materials on which to write (clay, papyrus, vellum).

Educated ancients thought science worth keeping, in Phoenician, Greek, and Roman times. Priest classes found writing powerful, and used it to store vast amounts of holy gobblygook, as is proper.

The development of syllabic alphabets made the use of moveable type feasible, and the Gutenberg press came into a world where writing mainly stored oral tradition. After printing the bible many times, the printer looked around.

You know how it is. Give a man a hammer, and he looks around for nails to pound. It was natural that the press expanded to print more and more and more.

As taxes, civilization, and engineering tamed the wilds and the roads, sending letters expanded, as did distribution of books. In between the letter and the book, emerged newspapers.

You gotta fill up a newspaper, right? Reporting news, the telling of stories (Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle), and the owner’s essaying to splain the world filled newspapers. Thus the essay. As literature became more accessible with the torture of young children- Oops, I meant the development of schools, then an appreciation of writing, and of essays expanded.

By the time of Marconi and Tesla, fiction of all types was flying around the world in books, magazines, and newspapers. Essays rode along. With Tesla’s invention of radio, and Marconi’s invention of radio, a new medium searched for content. Distributing news by radio worked well, and so did distribution of music and fiction. Thus the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger, and the soap operas. Rural farm electrification in the 1940’s made radio universal in the USA.

Evolution continues. Evolution’s rule is that the old form doesn’t vanish. The old and the new exist side by side, and begin to separate in function, to specialize. Like the right and left sides of your brain (visual and language), the two completely nerve transmission systems in your body (fast and slow), and the two completely different circulatory systems in your body (lymph and blood), both the old and the new coexist, but now handle different tasks.

Thus, handwriting took over from verbal storytelling, specializing in long tales. Then printed writing emerged, specializing in news, fiction, and essays. Radio emerged, taking fiction from magazines and music from live venues. The magazines were left to specialize, and magazines today all focus on specialized subjects. Movies arrived to take drama from the stage, and in the 50’s, television took drama from the movies and the radio, leaving movies with spectacles and radio with music.

And the short essay? What has happened to the short essay?

Like the short story, this artform has languished. Oh, great short essays have been written. Look in any New Yorker, or any trade-oriented magazine, or political newspapers. But the short essay has not been widely appreciated in our time.

But perhaps this may be changing. Perhaps the short essay — such as this one you are reading now — has found a new home, on the internet, in the weblog.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

It is more profitable to save money than to earn more money.

That’s it.

Whenever you earn money there is a certain amount of drag and cost. An example of drag might be government forms. Suppose you sell more retail merchandise. In that case you’ll have to do some additional work calculating, collecting, banking, reporting, remitting, and bookkeeping the additional sales tax as part of your forced labor on behalf of your state, so that for every new earned dollar you must labor.

An example of cost might be your cost of goods. Suppose you sold more groceries or birdhouses or teddybears. For each one you sell, you must purchase the groceries or birdhouses or teddybears, so that each newly earned dollar has some cost.

But suppose that, instead of selling more stuff, you found a way to save. For example, getting a cheaper supplier, doing manufacturing with a less costly process, or shipping it more cheaply. In that case, each dollar drops directly into your pocket, with no drag nor cost. That’s why saving money is usually more profitable than earning more money.

Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.

Ulloa Street, San Francisco, 1972: I’d flown my MGB across the desert between Christmas and New Years, to start a Masters at San Francisco State, and I’d found a room atop Mrs. Douglas’s house on Ulloa Street. From the windows of this single, high room, I could see the land fall away for twenty blocks to the ocean, and on the hazy ocean horizon, the Farallon Islands.

Dim steamers crept across the edge of the sky, the gulls wheeled and circled around the houses, and the night breeze from the ocean chilled to the bone.

But I ordered a hi-fi stereo receiver and powerful headphones that weighed a ton. I listened to new radio stations, and then sat at my IBM selectric, filled with cheap yellow paper, beside the window gazing to the ocean, listening to the foghorn warning the ships passing by. And wrote stories.

But one day I felt bad. Real bad.

By nightfall, I was doubled over with a pain in my guts. I awoke from troubled dozing to find all the covers heaped high, while I shivered with chills. Clearly I was freezing.

I had a thermometer. Puzzled and dim-witted, I checked it twice. It did indeed claim I was running at 104 degrees. Because my mother claimed that brain damage begins at 105, I called a medical emergency number. I described the pains. Appendix, they said. They said to take off the covers, to open the windows, to douse myself with cold water.

Mrs. Douglas, awakened, kindly gave me ice, and I spent the night pacing naked in that high room, in the dark with the cold ocean breeze flowing into the west window and out the east. Now and again I doused myself with ice water. My mind was blown, and I felt not warm but freezing. I felt like a penitent in torment.

In the morning around five, my fever broke, and I slept. A few hours later, my alarm reminded me to hie myself for medical attention. Diagnosis confirmed, into the hospital, and by three o’clock appendix gone.

During the night, I gained a roommate in the next bed, rather an old gentleman, still out from the anaesthetic. The next morning, I spoke to him. He replied briefly, but something was wrong. We fell to conversation. Here’s what had happened:

He was German, very German. In fact had served, a lieutenant at age 22, as communications officer for Rommel, the desert fox. I didn’t ask much of those days, for I knew nothing about the war, and he was preoccupied.

His story emerged. He’d had an operation on the spine. And this morning when he awoke, he was mostly paralyzed, and he was blind. He was waiting for his doctor, but doctor had gone out of town.

Off and on, we talked. We were in limbo, lives in abeyance, entrapped by the body’s failure. How did it turn out? The good news is that doctor did show up, and reassured the lientenant that a temporary swelling had caused the problem, and that it would pass. He would recover from paralysis; he would recover from blindness.

Did he? I think so; he seemed to be recovering when I left. I wish I could describe the flow of conversation, the way it unfolded in dramatic bits and pieces. But I cannot. I was drained and loggy for sleep, and the ache in my belly seemed far more important than the man next door and a war in a desert far away.

Within three days I had healed up, and things were back to normal. I hardly remembered my days in the desert.

Some visitors may not know that I collect seashells. My collection is quite extensive. In fact, it’s so large that I cannot store my seashells at my house, and so I store my seashells on various beaches around the world. Perhaps you have seen some of them.

Excerpt from iowablog, stolen outright for your enjoyment. And now, the jokes …

Charles Dickens: Please, sir, I’d like a martini.
Bartender: Sure thing. Olive or twist?

James Joyce: I’ll take a Guinness.
Bartender: So Charles Dickens was in here yesterday.
James Joyce: (drinks)
Bartender: And he asked for a martini and I said, “Olive or twist?”
James Joyce: (drinks)
Bartender: You see, it’s funny because he wrote a book called “Oliver Twist.”
James Joyce: What a crappy joke.

Ernest Hemingway: Gin.
Bartender: So Charles Dickens was in here two days ago.
Ernest Hemingway: Joyce already told me that story.

Franz Kafka: I’d like a mineral water.
Bartender: Olive or twist?
Franz Kafka: I can’t digest solid food.

Mark Twain: Give me a brandy.
Bartender: So Charles Dickens came in the other day and ordered a martini.
Mark Twain: Did he take an olive or twist? Ha ha ha!
Bartender: (tearful) You did that on purpose, didn’t you?

Virginia Woolf: I’ll take your second-best cognac and unadulterated experience.
Bartender: We don’t have that. This is a bar.
Virginia Woolf: Patriarchy! (drowns)

Fairfax, California: A former client (of my voicemail company) asked about current rates. After I’d quoted prices, he wanted them cheaper, which I declined simply as unprofitable.

His email today said: “I can understand your rationale that they are not profit-generating packages, but at the same time, aren’t they pretty minimal to maintain? What’s wrong with a bunch of bread & butter stuff that takes little effort? I could get a $7.95 voicemail from Pacific Bell for less.”

He’s not counted his costs. For the PacBell home voicemail, he must provide the phone line. Including the phone line cost, the PacBell voicemail costs $31 monthly, lots more than ours at $9 to $13.50 which includes the phone line.

But the interesting part is his suggestion to run “Bread and Butter” accounts, even if they are not profitable. I’d ask: how much butter would zero money buy?

To me, that seems like no bread, no butter.

I am reminded of the two cowboys who decided to make some money.

They’d buy produce from the farmers, carry it to the town square on Saturday, and sell it from the back of their pickup truck. They did so, that first Saturday, and sold all the produce. The only problem was that they sold it for the same price they bought it. Adding up their profits at the end of the day, there were none.

“Well,” said one to the other, “We’re just going to have to get a bigger truck.”