This is a reworking of a reworking of a story by Maurice Nicoll.

Once upon a time there was a great and ancient forest.  In the middle of the forest there lived an old and majestic oak tree.  Its limbs were home to birds, its acorns fed many animals.  Generation after generation of acorns fell to the ground and after awhile they formed a community and they had their own way of looking at the world.  For example, for one to say to another ‘you’re nuts!’ was quite a complement and much prized.  The goal of nearly every acorn was to have a bright, shiny, blemish-free shell.  Much work went into this: visits to the buffer’s shop to be cleaned and buffed; visits to the nut doctor to mend cracked shells;  group therapy sessions to deal with issues such as fear of falling, etc.

As you can imagine, condition of the shell was a primary factor in one’s social position and acorns are nuts about social position.

Then one day a bird dropped an old, dirty cracked acorn from the sky right into the middle of the acorn community.  His thoughts were not nutty, they were crazy.  ‘We can be that!’ he said, motioning to the oak tree.  ‘The first step is for our shells to crack and us to sink into the ground!’  How far was that going to get him in the acorn community?  ‘We would no longer be acorns if we did that!’ they argued.  He agreed.

Winter came and then the spring.  We don’t know what happened to all the acorns.  Some were taken away by animals, one in particular though, shunned by the others and now largely without a shell, sank into the ground.  At the same time the old oak was beyond its normal span of years and that spring it didn’t leaf out as it always had, but a sprout of an oak came up near the old tree.  Who knows what happened after that?