Mac and Butch are almost 22 months old now. I take them out most evenings in the stroller. They shout out their favorite letters from the signs along the street, yell BUS! TREE! EPPANE! SIGN!, eat cookies at Starbucks, wave at trains, go on the swings at the playground, and so on.

On the way to Queens Boulevard, we pass a brick building (they're all brick buildings) with a few feet of dirt and random vegetation between it and the sidewalk. The guy who lives there (whose name is Guy) is a ringer for Burgess Meredith, age 50 or so. Every day, he's out there battling his stump.

It used to be a tree. Now it's a stump, and it's Guy's nemesis. He wants it gone. I can't remember how long this has been going on, but it's why I know him. When I see somebody battling a stump day in and day out, I want to know that person. So every day we stop and look at the stump, and admire the new hack marks, or axe gashes, or some slight reduction of overall mass, and hear about what the other men in the neighborhood suggested recently.

There are always developments. Guy tried some tree poison, or different leverage, or whatever. And always, the stump is there, and he's sitting near it, having conversations with passersby between efforts.

It was a few months ago when I first met him, and I remember saying, after a conversation in which he told me all about all these different approaches, "So what are you going to do?"

He said "Keep at it until there's nothing left."

I like a man who knows how to treat his nemesis, but this raging battle is a neighborhood fixture. It's what he's known for. It would be easy to assume the battle, not the result, is who he his.

Yesterday the stump was gone.


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