Chapter 2: For the Caterpillars
To reconstruct this desk, we’ll have to go back seven years, three months, and some days. We won’t bother ourselves with just how many. For our purposes this will all happen now, of necessity, in the margins of your day, with its unique light striking the page.
An aside of some relevance: A while back an elderly-care nurse, who also happens to be a friend, related a small, but poignant incident. A cantankerous invalid had summoned her to wheel him about the facility’s courtyard. Several minutes into the stroll, he ordered her to roll him off the path. Though confused, she obeyed, then watched in astonishment as the man extended a quivering hand toward a mulberry leaf. She didn’t know why at first, but then she saw it–an insect both brilliant and strange. By her account, the geezer then scrunched up his eyes, scrubbed them with his knuckles, and cried, “Never in all my eighty-six…. God made a new bug!” Senile? Maybe. But there was something more troubling him–something deeper. For perhaps the first time in his life, he seemed stricken by the fact that he’d no doubt fall of the face of the earth never having witnessed entire worlds of elusive beauty.
Yes, the time for us will always be now. That said, no use blessing the food cold. You may now nibble these leaves like the caterpillars do. As you’re feeding on me, my only hope is that you blossom into something more stunning than a bookworm; otherwise, who would roll off their path to greet you?