Web Spiral

I got myself caught in one of those web spirals recently. While speeding along the information highway, I took an off-ramp into a quaint little village. After visiting for a bit I could have hopped back on the expressway but instead I opted to take a back road. This, in turn, led me on to other side paths, each a little more intimate until finally I was on a gravel driveway standing outside someone's home. Okay, enough with the lame (or is it lane?) metaphor, here's what happened.

I was bored (isn't that how it always starts?) so I typed "squirrel" into my search engine. I've had squirrels on my mind of late (more about that in an upcoming post). Anyway, this led me to a Wikipedia page with more information than I really wanted to know about squirrels. Normally, this is where I stop but this time one of the links at the bottom of the page stood out - it just had a funny sounding name. So, I followed it. It led to a page dedicated to squirrels written by a man who obviously loves squirrels. There was a section with numerous updates going back to 1995. The entry that caught my eye was the most recent one. It contained the words "more to come soon" - and it was dated January, 2003. Over five years ago…what happened? There was such enthusiasm and care evident in the site that I wondered why it had been neglected. I feared the worst - maybe squirrel-guy was a tad presumptuous with his "more to come" promise. Perhaps he should have said "more to come unless I'm killed by a rabid squirrel I was trying to pet". I needed to know. I followed a link to the parent page of the squirrel page.

The parent page showed a picture of squirrel-guy and his wife. Besides the squirrel page link, there were a few others, including one for his wife's gallery as she is apparently an artist. I followed it in hopes of learning more. There, I found a small blurb dated May 2008 mentioning something about an art showing. Not much personal data. I imagined a grieving widow, throwing herself into her art (avenging his death by only painting rodents in unflattering poses). Then I noticed a link to her blog. The blog was pay dirt - an entry for today already. I searched the page for mention of her husband. There it was from just a few days earlier. Her blog went back to 2004 and I confess I searched much of it for more references to him. I needed to find out why he'd given up on his page. Had he been wronged by a squirrel? What I found was a man dedicated to his wife and children, supporting them and trying to launch his own career. From the scraps I could gather, I imagined a man just too busy actually living to bother with updating a trivial web page. I could even see him reading the old squirrel page and laughing to himself, recalling how much effort he used to put into it. Maybe his last entry should have said "more to come unless life takes over".