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MONKEYS AND MUSHROOMS

No, that's not a recipe either, though I wouldn't mind seeing it on a menu. When the monkey squad raided in February and ripped all the shiitake buds off our oak logs, the mushrooms immediately went hard to work making even more new buds (monkeys and shiitake clearly go a long way back together) in readiness for the warming rains of Spring. Since then I've kept a watchful eye on the little brown budding delicacies, ready to harvest them at the earliest possible moment. It's an endless battle to outmonkey the appropriately red-faced simians, who have my entire schedule down in their organizers and know when I go to work, almost never marauding when I'm home. But outmonkeying monkeys shouldn't be any problem for a member of the highest order in the manmade hierarchy, and accordingly of greater intelligence; I know when the monkeys go to work, too. So yesterday before going into town I harvested just a couple of the larger shiitake, leaving the smaller ones to grow larger in the rain of the day, assuming (an error-prone action available only to the highest order) that the rain would keep the monkeys immobile for the day (since they have no umbrellas, I guess) and I'd be home tomorrow to keep an eye out. But the fact is, that if you spend your entire life in mountain forests and you're hungry enough, the weather doesn't mean a thing. Because despite the all-day heavy rain the simian stealth squad paid my mushrooms an extended visit and got fat on my labor (I sense here a strong analogy to government bureaucracy, but will forthrightly avoid such an inviting and deserving tangent, in fact it may be much more than an analogy, the two may be very near equivalence, and stick to the monkeys for the moment). Due to some error on the monkeys' part, however (no way considerate; they probably just got full) they left me about 20% of the take, as I discovered this morning when I went out to check. I immediately harvested all that were left, and resolved even more firmly that I'd demand a greater percentage at our next interspecies conference.