Mostly butterflies
...A dispatch from bewilderness
The former professor of ethics says she specialized in secrets. As in, studying them. Evidently, she studied secrets kept by 50,000 people. Most of them kept 13 secrets but some kept as many as 38. Most about lies, money, sex, romance, or a hidden hobby or possession.
The former professor of environmental science says oysters open and close their shells based on the moon. Coral also follows the master clock of the moon.
A former professor of something else says her grandson, who’s really a poet, sell kitsch as status pieces. Including an “eggplant-emoji drone with a Bluetooth speaker.”
The former professor of history says his granddaughter is really a poet, too.
The recovering former editor says, “My brain has too many tabs open.”
The former professor of anthropology says, “Writing is thought to have been inspired by the tracks of animals left in snow or desert sands.”
The former professor of environmental science says, “The North American prairie, which is one of the richest ecosystems on Earth, is vanishing faster than the Amazon.”
The former professor of biology says, “We are vanishing, too. We have used up most of our allotted time.”
The woman who had a stroke says, “Things return to me in no particular order. Then disappear again. Recall. Forget. Rinse. Repeat.”
The former professor of marketing says, “We are promised that if we ‘optimize enough,’ we can outsmart aging. We can’t.”
The woman who had a stroke says, “To pour a cup of tea, you need a hand that lifts. An eye that sees.”
The wine connoisseur says: “You can live to be 100 if you give up the things that make you want to be 100.”
The former gerontologist recalls, “We need to know what is too little. What is too much. What is enough.”
The recovering editor says, “Today my email promised how I can remember names and faces, how I can complete the complete The New York Times crossword puzzle in record time, and how I can write a poem about a frog.”
A non-former professor says she’s making collages of butterflies.
The former writer says, “A decade or so ago, someone I know decided to do something people found either deeply profound or deeply disturbing. She wrote her own eulogy. Not because she had inside information about her expiration date. She wrote it because she wanted to live a life worthy of the eulogy.”
This one ends on a decision: a deliberate act of writing toward what you want your life to have been. The collages of butterflies and the self-written eulogy are doing the same thing from different directions. Making something that says: I was here, and here is what I chose.
My late wife Fran was so fearful that I would die before her and she wouldn’t find words that I wrote her some. A former professor of law would say “predecease”,
The words were about my making her breakfasts. Saved on her Desktop, they were a comfort to her. I’ll use them in a memoir I’m writing about her and me and cancer. I don’t much care about how anyone eulogizes me. I won’t be there at the time.