I spent the majority of my spring break with a 5-inch tall ceramic squirrel. I would consider it some of the most productive time I’ve ever spent in my hometown.
On a Saturday night at 10 p.m., as the frozen yogurt shops closed around us, my friend and I were left with approximately three options: watch a movie, play a board game or find something vaguely illegal to do. We decided on the third and headed to the 24-hour CVS in search of a kite to fly out the sunroof of my car.
For future reference: CVS does not sell kites. They do, however, sell ceramic garden statuettes.
“Dude.” I pointed. “Squirrel.” It only barely resembled any actual squirrel I had seen, but it was impossibly adorable, with giant beady eyes and a puffy-cheeked smile that I felt the need to imitate every time I looked at it. Ten dollars. We had no idea what we were going to do with it, but we knew we needed it. Personally, I was in favor of breaking into someone’s house and leaving it there while they slept. Instead, we decided we would take it on adventures. We made it a Facebook account and proceeded to tote it around town with a digital camera for the next four days.
Why it’s easier for a squirrel to find adventure in a small town than two college students, I don’t know. Maybe the squirrel was easier to please. Still, it became our adventure. In only a few short days, it experienced about as much of my hometown as I had in 19 years. It went to the beach, played on the playground, played Frisbee, guitar and piano. It rode a skateboard, a surfboard and a dirt bike. It followed me to all my usual haunts: Barnes & Noble, Peet’s Coffee, even my high school. It protested the closing of my favorite burger hut.
But more importantly, it did all the things I should have done, all the things I have wanted to do but didn’t and all the things I never thought of doing.
It “got drunk” off my parents’ liquor, and ended up in my oven, a lingerie store, the shower and broken at the bottom of my Jacuzzi. It made friends with a whole host of dogs, Luke Skywalker, a Troll, a gnome, Samuel L. Jackson and Barack Obama. It reconnected with my high school friends. It hit up Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day…twice. It went on Chat Roulette to have nice conversations with men with cats, girls with broken English from across the world and a few masturbators.
That stupid little squirrel became a connection point. It was a reason for me to leave my house in the morning, forgo the exercising I promised I would do all of spring break, call up that quiet kid I never talked to much and say, “Hey, do you have five minutes? We have this project…” It was an excuse to go talk to my favorite teacher without the stigma of too-old-ness I always feel when returning to my high school. It gave me a reason to try to break into a church, and it should have been a reason for me to stop that nun and ask, “Would you hold this for a sec?” It was something to talk about when the dinner conversation between my recently separated parents became stilted. It was a way to spend 80 percent of my spring break with one of my favorite friends and still always have an answer to the question, “What are we going to do?”
This summer, the squirrel is taking a road trip to Vancouver. It’s going to sit on my dashboard and guide me up the Western coast. It can’t read a map or help me find the nearest gas station, but it has a way of nosing out adventure that I think I find more useful anyway.