Eggs and other stuff

My favorite story in How Some People Like Their Eggs is "Coffee Pot Tree." The story features a retrospective first person narrator, looking back on the days leading up to when the tree was "topped, dropped, and carted away." I like how this story, through the narrator, creates a complete sense of suburbia. There's the "secretary for the Neighborhood Advisory and Recreation Committee [NARC]," there's lawn winterizing and leaf-blowing, and there are "domestic rodents." I also love the simple acceptance from the story's start that the "coffee pot tree" is exactly what it sounds like it is, no trick about it. You simply accept that at the story's beginning. And, as a tree, it functions (that is, for humans) no different than a live oak or ponderosa pine, and the narrator misses its leaves rustling in the wind, its coffee pots turning the tree into a wind chime. He thinks about days earlier, when the tree had cast shade and been the subject of conversation. And at the story's close he's slurping down the dregs of a wayward coffee pot abandoned in his lawn after the felling. It's a "coffee pot tree," and a tree. The narrator's saddened that the tree must come down since the NARC decided that it had become "a general menace to suburban equilibrium." This makes me think of the story as a kind of outline of nature one and nature two. We have to distinguish what we mean when we talk about "nature." And the story comments on this. By nature one we mean an abstracted kind of nature, the nature we think of when we think of the universe as a system of order drawn out of chaos. Our abstract notion of the idea of gravity, for example, is what we mean when we talk about the nature of celestial bodies. And we mean by nature one the non human-adulterated natural world. By nature two we mean the natural world as construed by humans. Our romantic associations with nature, for example, are a psychological manifestation of nature two. We can also look at nature two as the human-impacted natural world. Space junk in orbit around the planet, your sewer system, a suburb. What are our relationships to the natural world around us, and how should those relationships be refereed? I think there's a current of the natural world underlying this chapbook. Maybe it's because Sean runs through and plays in the woods a lot. Maybe that's too much a "life and letters" way of looking at this. Nonetheless, the book is serious, even if it's funny (as the NARC, here, in "Coffee Pot Tree" evinces), and it's asking serious questions about us, and what the hell we are doing. What you should do is buy it, the book, that is.