Friends who have known me for some time are familiar with Bear Day.  It’s an idea I had several years ago – and for which I often advocate, sometimes with the inspiration of beverage, and often during the summer tourist season.

The idea is pretty simple: Once a year, before sunrise on a foreordained day, several dozen live bears are gathered up and let loose on the city streets.  From dawn to dawn they can roam unfettered.  Citizens are not allowed to shoot the bears, although they may engage them in manual combat, if it is their wont (or last hope). In the wee hours of the following day, the bears are rounded up, drugged, and taken back to the wild. Life returns to normal.

The basic point of Bear Day is to remind human beings of the primal order of nature, and our place in the food chain.  It would also be a day off of work and school – because who can go outside with bears roaming around? So it would be like Labor Day, except no one would ever forget what the day was about.

There are occasional news stories that seem to suggest that history is basically an inexorable march toward the establishment of Bear Day.  I’ll post them when they crop up, without this windy explanation.

Today’s installation: bears.