At eighty-nine now I'm a lot closer to my place of rest than I was back with Grandmother in nineteen thirty-six or seven. In that childhood west of Joplin then I can still hear my grandmother crooning soothing lullaby to me as she walks around the house holding me in her arms. The last and still lingering with me remnants of the cocoon.
My other memories mostly center around the imaginal process of the dissolving caterpillar creating its own butterfly. An early instance has me careening down a big hill on my new, first bike -- imagining a Superman sort of takeoff soon but discovering that a bike without coaster brakes spins those pedals mighty fast on the way down a steep hill. The spill on that hill corrected my imagining smartly without doing much damage to my limber young body, and it also set the pattern for my future imaginings in the absence of a father's minding presence.
This young lad is about to discover that the heavy door before him swings inward.
We construct our lives out of discoveries like that, and certainly we all run into doors that open the wrong way. It makes a difference to be in a chrysalis rather than a cocoon, and just what kind of either we are in nourishes and shapes the stories we grow into. So does the fierceness and inventive flexibility of our intentionality. I have a lot of hope for the guy.
I photographed him and his father at Prescott's Wild Iris Cafe sometime in the early 2020's. I would go there often for the ambiance, as we say, for the connectedness and windings in with others that arise to envelop us from time to time while still leaving us free to read our paper or chat with our friends. And I still do, but this musing is not a memoir, nor do I want it to be an endless mulling over of the last lines of Milton's Paradise Lost. So I'll finish up for now by quoting them from this source and emphasizing a line or two myself.
