In the apple orchard of a small town, there lived a squirrel named Lefty. Lefty was known throughout the squirrel community as a tremendous athlete. As a young squirrel, he performed acrobatic feats that amazed his peers. He would scramble across the thinnest branches and leap across the widest divides. There was no tree he couldn't climb, and no rooftop he couldn't scale.
But Lefty was boastful, and some of the older squirrels considered him foolish. There was his obsession with apples, for instance. While the other squirrels contented themselves by eating the pink blossoms of the apple trees, Lefty thought he could do better. Apples afforded a bigger meal, and so it was apples that Lefty wanted. As soon as the apples ripened from green to red, Lefty would dance across the branches and pounce on them. Inevitably, the apples would fall to the ground.
"What a waste!" the other squirrels would exclaim, watching Lefty trying to haul the apples back to his home. "Those apples are too heavy!"
Sure enough, they were right. Despite his athletic ability, Lefty never could lift an apple. But this didn't stop him from trying. "You'll see," he told his squirrel friends. "While you waste your time on little flowers, I'll be feasting on apples!"
Again and again, he would dance across the branches and pounce on the apples. And again and again, the apples would be abandoned on the ground, where they would rot.
Lefty kept this up until late autumn, when the weather changed and the leaves fell. Soon enough, the apple trees were bare. Whereas the other squirrels had satisfied their bellies with apple blossoms, Lefty's belly was empty.
"Won't you share some of your food with me?" Lefty asked his squirrel friends. But they turned a cold shoulder to Lefty. They had warned him not to spend his time chasing apples. Now, perhaps, he would learn his lesson.