Just behind our house was the tallest mountain in town, which compared to other mountains in other towns was really more of a hillock.

I didn't care. I was going to plant my tree at the very top of the mountain. That way it would be a beacon to everyone around the entire world that I was a man. Of course, it wouldn't be very impressive for at least a hundred years or so, but my grandkids' grandkids would have a great story to tell.

I had an early shift one April Saturday, and the whole time I was at the restaurant I couldn't stop thinking about planting my tree. I was so distracted I cut my finger on the meat slicer, and I burnt my face on fry grease that splashed up from the fryer.

Mr. Shaw sent me home early. As I left, Jodi gave me a look and squeezed my arm to see if I was okay.

I got home and geared up right away. I wanted the tree planting to be as rugged as possible, so I put on jeans and a t-shirt, and then some of Dad's old work boots that were two sizes too big. I cinched them up around my ankles and went out to the garage. I picked up my dirt, my manure, and my tools and headed up the mountain. The peak was about two hours away. I had to pace myself.

Three hours later, after slipping and spraining both of my ankles, I finally reached the top of the mountain. A bear had found me, and decided that instead of ignoring the weird kid tromping through the woods carrying twenty pounds of dirt and faeces that she would chase him and make him drop everything. I remembered a scene from Back to the Future III, when Marty arrived in 1885 and a bear went after him. He'd dropped his boots and the bear had been satisfied with gnawing on them for a while.

I tried the same technique.

It worked, but only after I had finally left the bear behind did I remember one crucial detail to the scene. Marty had already been wearing shoes, and the boots were part of his disguise. I didn't have any other shoes. I was now on my man-quest in sock feet, and it had just started to rain. I had to wander back to find my stuff, and lost an hour in the process.

By the time I got to the peak, I was cold, hungry, and ready for a nap. My feet were sore, and the entire bottom of my left sock was gone, leaving a weird sort of leg sleeve dangling around my ankle.

I set my plan in motion. I dug a huge hole, because Douglas Fir trees had huge root systems that spread out all over the place. I ripped open the bags of soil and manure and dumped them in the hole. I used the rake to mix everything up, and stepped out of the hole. I stank, and the rain was pounding down.

It was okay. I was almost done.

I had the Douglas Fir cone in my pocket and took it out very carefully. It was a little squashed from when I had to run away from the bear, but looked every bit as manly a cone as I could have hoped for. I bent down into the hole and made a cone-sized pit with my fingers.

This was it, the moment of truth.

My first step down the path to manhood was about to be completed.

I heard a rustle.

There was something in the forest.

The bear was probably coming back to eat the feet that had once been in the boots it had already consumed. It was behind me, then in front of me, then behind me again.

Bears didn't move that fast.

It had to be a giant mountain lion, not caring about boots or feet at all, just hungry for the pumping blood of an arterial puncture in my throat.

The rustling got louder. I thought of burrowing into the dirt and manure mixture, but didn't think I'd get deep enough in time. I picked up my rake and brandished it like a broadsword. The rustling was ferocious now, and I braced myself for battle.

A tiny face popped out of the underbrush, and I couldn't have felt stupider.

It was a squirrel.

Nothing more than a furry, kind of cute black squirrel. It might have even been a chipmunk. I could never remember which ones had the bushy tail or the little skinny tail. This one had a bushy tail, and was mad at me. I had enraged this rodent somehow, and it was telling me off in an angry tirade of shrill chirps.

I was very relieved it wasn't a bear.

"I'm terribly sorry," I said to the squirrel. "I'm almost done."

He wasn't having any of it. He bent his legs and leapt towards me. Sailing through the air, he landed on my neck and I let out a toe-curling shriek.

I had never been attacked by a squirrel. Its claws were sharp; five piercing hooks at the end of each arm. My stupid mind started wandering even as the squirrel's claws punctured my neckmeat, and I wondered if the squirrel called his forelimbs his arms only when he was standing up, or all the time just to make things easier. The squirrel moved down my arm in those weird little jitter steps that squirrels take when they move straight down a vertical surface. I had to fight my 'shake the damn thing off because it's probably giving you rabies' instinct: I still didn't want to hurt the cute little guy.

At least until he got down to my hand, bit a chunk out of my palm and made off with my Douglas Fir pine cone.

I suddenly wasn't feeling so warmly toward the tree rat. He hopped from my arm down to the ground and scampered over to the nearest tree. I followed him, and he was up the tree and happily crunching away on my pine cone before I had a chance to get him.

"I hope you cut your cheek on the sharp bits!" I called, pointing my finger up at him.

A stabbing pain from the bottom of my right foot throbbed sharply, and I looked down to see what was wrong. A stick had worked its way into my foot while I was battling the squirrel. It wasn't a very big stick, but was more than big enough to draw blood and hurt like a bitch when I pulled it out.

"This was supposed to be easy!" I roared at the heavens. "Manly, but easy!"

I was not about to be defeated by a tree rat's need for pilfered pine cone, or fir cone in this case. I threw the disgusting blood-drenched stick down to the ground and tightened my gut against the stabbing pain in my sole.

"You're mine, rat," I said to the squirrel, and began my ascent of the tree.

I didn't have a plan, I was running on pure stupid now.

My foot screamed every time I had to use it to get leverage on the trunk, but I ignored it. A chittering came from above, and I squinted up at the squirrel's pointy face laughing at me as it devoured my cone.

"I'm going to kill you, cook you, and eat you, you little bastard," I muttered.

The squirrel bounded up two or three branches and shrieked squirrel curse words down at me. I'm positive that if I had known squirrel, I would have heard some pretty inappropriate stuff flowing from the nasty little rat's face.

We continued our chase up the tree; me climbing slowly and clumsily, barely able to cling on to the branches. It was sheer stubbornness holding me to the tree, while gravity tried its very hardest to pull me back down to the Earth so very far below. He kept lazily hopping up branches as I chased him, but he was running out of room. We were nearly at the top of the tree. He got to the top branch and could go no further. I got within arm's reach, and stretched to try to grab him. He shrieked at me, taunting me to battle. My finger brushed him, and he scratched me so hard he drew blood.

I bellowed and nearly let go of the tree.

Now it was on.

I climbed a little higher, trying to get a better foothold so I could really get a grip on him. I got to eye level and we stared into each other's souls. His eyes were pure black; pure black and pure evil. I could smell the malice oozing from his squirrelly claws, and the joy in his teeth as he swallowed the last morsel of my now demolished fir cone. He chittered again, this time a low chitter that might as well have been evil laughter.

I lunged at him, shrieking a battle cry of 'Will!' as I swiped at him with outstretched hands. I didn't know why I cried my own name as a battle cry, but it seemed appropriate at the time. He ducked away from me, and I watched as he bounded over to the next tree.

Unfortunately, he never exactly made it over to the next tree.

A huge eagle that might as well have been a pterodactyl swooped in and snatched the squirrel out of mid-air.

There it went, my attempt at manliness riding the warm air pockets out of my life. That had been the last good fir cone of the season, anything that fell now was already dead. I would have to wait until next year, and by that point my entire family was likely to have gone insane.

The eagle banked to its right and flapped its wings once to lift itself a little higher. A strong gust of wind nearly blew me out of the tree, and the eagle was blown off course. The wind blew again, and the eagle was forced into a barrel roll. As it righted itself, the squirrel popped free of the eagle's talons. The eagle decided it had had enough of the wind battle, and flapped until it was out of sight. I watched the squirrel's lifeless body plummet to the Earth, and as it fell I had a bizarre but brilliant revelation: the squirrel's guts were now full of fir cone and fir cone seeds. I could gut it and pick the seeds out and still get home in time for dinner.

I dropped down the tree as fast as I could go without impaling myself on any of the branches. My foot was still reminding me how much getting stabbed with a piece of wood really hurt. I hit the ground and ran over to the squirrel's body.

"What the hell was that?" I asked the universe.

I gingerly picked up the dead squirrel with my pointer finger and thumb, holding it away from me in case it had some weird rodent disease that was lethal to humans. I walked over to my tree hole, which was getting muddier by the second from the torrents of rain bucketing down from the sky. If I didn't plant the seed soon, my hole would be a swamp and I'd have to do it all again another day.

That wasn't an option.

I had no idea how to gut a squirrel. We weren't supposed to start dissection until next year, and we were starting with a grasshopper. I had played Operation a lot when I was a kid, but this was a recently living and breathing squirrel, and not a cartoon dude with a red nose that buzzed. My sister had almost peed her pants playing that game once because the buzzer had scared her so bad. Operation wasn't going to help me here.

Then I had another crazy and undeniably mad idea.

The squirrel was dead, and was going to rot someday. It probably wouldn't take too long in our soggy climate, and once it was gone, the seeds inside its belly would touch the soil and hopefully germinate.

"The hell with it," I said dramatically, and I plunged the squirrel's body into the hole. I quickly covered it with mud and jumped up with my face to the rain. I screamed my own name again, because it felt manlier than just screaming, and began my long barefoot descent back down the mountain.

Hemingway list #1, done.

I had planted my tree.

She takes a book from the very highest shelf, stretching to reach it and nearly dropping it on her head. It is a dusty volume simply titled 'Metaphysics' which is very fitting in a Metaphysical bookstore. Not a lot of people know what metaphysics are any more, and to have an entire bookstore dedicated to the pursuit and study of metaphysics is a true rarity. 

Well-thumbed and previously owned, the book is exactly what she was looking for.

She browses for a few more minutes, and is approached by a young man with a moustache. He sports thick eyeglasses that are clearly designed for a far-sighted individual, and she tries to imagine what he'd look like with normal-sized eyes, instead of the intensely magnified ones that she sees behind the lenses. 

"That's a very good book," he says.

She doesn't like smooth guys, guys that are all flash and swagger without any substance. There's a little flash and swagger with Mr. Moustache, but at least he's starting the conversation with honest opinion as opposed to some barely concealed comment about her breasts.

"Is it now?" she asks.

"You've read it?"

"I've read pretty much every book in here."

"Is that so?" she asks, her voice thick with incredulity. He doesn't look the type to sit and read books on barely accepted topics at great length. He looks more like the man you would find watching broadcast football all day long, any day he could get his hands on a remote control. 

"Yes, that's so," he replies, a hint of testiness in his voice.

A bit of a temper, she thinks. I like a bit of a temper. It helps me know he's alive.

"You must be well off to afford all those books," she says. 

"No, not really."

"Then how could you have read them? It's not like you'd just find this kind of book sitting around at the library."

"No, you probably wouldn't. That's why I started this bookstore."

She nearly drops 'Metaphysics'. 

"You started this bookstore."

He nods. There's a definite beaming quality to the smile on his face.

"I'm not just going to bring any book in here. I have to read them to know if they're good enough to be in my bookstore. I know more about metaphysics than most, I think."

She raises an eyebrow. "Are you sure?"

"Why don't we talk metaphysics over dinner to find out who is the true expert on the subject?"

She realizes that she's been set up, but doesn't mind. It was a good set-up, executed flawlessly.

"What time do you close up?" she asks.

He glances around the store. There is no one else inside.

"It's metaphysics, lady. We're not exactly setting sales records here."

She laughs. He loves the sound.

"Shall we?"