Don't sit under the apple tree

[austin_dern]

As might have been heard --- if the break-ins on local news are to be believed, this was the most important news event in the history of ever --- there were heavy storms passing through the New York City area this week. This has given my father not just abundant steady water for his new doomed lawn, but has also given him a chance to be smug which I've heard him talk about three times now.

When I got up Friday he told me to look out the front door and see what I saw. There was a Home Depot truck across the road, which seemed about as interesting as it does to you now. He was chuckling about a tree which had fallen over, which I didn't see because by then the Home Depot people had removed it and the truck obscured where the tree would have been. When my father came to understand this (about an hour later) he apologized for confusing me; my confusion had been limited to asking, ``Oh, your new car?'' and wondering why he thought a Home Depot truck was so interesting. I wrote it up to his home-fixing occupation and preoccupation.

It seems that last week the neighbor there talked about how he was going to clean up his yard, getting rid of those unsightly tree roots that poked up above ground. And my father told him: don't do that, that's what's holding the tree in place. The neighbor did it anyway, and in this week's storms, the tree fell over. My father's been chuckling about this since and kidding those who pass by about waiting for his ``you told me so''. Now, I wouldn't have chopped off the tree roots in any case --- why spoil the structure of a tree for any reason besides cleaning off diseased limbs? --- but I do feel the logical-fallacy-prompted need to point out, there were locally very severe winds, including a statewide tornado watch like this was the midwest or something so the trimming is not necessarily at fault. But, yeah, messing with the tree roots was a dumb thing to do and the neighbor should be lightly mocked for it.

Trivia: When he was 23, George Bernard Shaw worked for Thomas Edison's telephone company in London. Having read Tyndall and Helmholtz, Shaw believed he was ``the only person in the entire establishment who knew the current scientific explanation of telephony''. Source: Edison: A Biography, Matthew Josephson.

Currently Reading: Growing Up Weightless, John M Ford. Boy, he could write.