king, or queen, of the road

As I idled at the stoplight, I watched it balletically maneuver in and around vehicles making a left turn, essentially a U-turn to head back from whence they came. The performance lasted less than a minute. I say "it" because at my distance I couldn't discern whether the performer was male or female, and since there was only one of "it" I am choosing a singular, indeterminate pronoun.

Danger filled the air.

It could have been hit by one of the turning vehicles. I suspect such a collision would not have been fatal to it, but who can say? A collision certainly would not harm any of the drivers or their vehicles.  

It danced and swirled and weaved artfully and gracefully, avoiding any contact with windshields or metal. Its sense of smell and vision were life-savers. 

Was it aware of the risks, the potential dangers and threats, as I was? It had no time to think, just react. 

I winced a few times, as if to say to myself, "Uh-oh, careful, watch out, ouch, no, yikes."

It performed proudly and regally, I dare say majestically.

And with impunity.

Harmlessly.

Before I knew it, it was time for me to turn. I lost track of it. It was gone. Or I was gone from it.

I saw no milkweed nearby, but it could have been growing in the median or on the side of the road.

Was it tired from its flight from Mexico?

This solitary Monarch butterfly splendidly survived, for that moment, that day.

No regal decrees were issued.

It fared better than five of the six wives of Henry VIII. (The last one survived him.)

"My" Monarch had nothing to prove, no obsession with heirs or riches or lineage or royal puissance.

Just flight.

Just Monarch-ness.

I, your loyal and humble servant, bow before you.

what shall I read?

What shall I read while en route to or in Iceland? Today I will finish "1954," a fine book by Bill Madden about that year and baseball and integration and other stuff. It will have been the thirteenth book I read in 2015. When I told my coffee-shop friend Bill B. that I was going to Iceland, right away he told me he had read two books by Icelander Halldor Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. Bill is admirably well read. I bow before him. So today I went to the DeWitt branch of the Onondaga County Public Library with the hope of securing a Laxness tome. No such luck. Instead, I came away with Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and Mr. Bones by Paul Theroux. I was inspired to pick up the Nabokov because I had just finished an article in The New Yorker about his letters to his wife, Vera. I chose Theroux because he is such an acclaimed travel writer, though this is a collection of twenty short stories (fiction). I will begin one of these books tonight, Deo volente, and will likely continue one of these books on my flight to Reykjavik. Come to think of it, it will make much more sense to buy a Laxness volume in Reykjavik, maybe in his native tongue or maybe in English. I cherish in advance a lovely bookstore in the world's most northern capital city. There's a selfish motive involved here: imagine how impressed the lovely woman sitting across from me at the cafe will be when I breezily mention Laxness or if she sees me reading one of his works (if it's the Icelandic version I will be faking it; but they say "fake it till you make it").

p.s. Thank you, Wikipedia, for the aural pronunciation of the author of Lolita. iIve had it mostly right all these years, while other pronunciations I've heard over the years were not quite on the mark, which is fine. 

Mysteries of Fate and Transport

Fate and transport.

I love that term, even though it evokes a dreadful memory. Edit that to say, formerly dreadful.

First, the memory. Or, as Vladimir Nabokov memorably put it, in the wondrous title of a piercing and singular autobiography: Speak, Memory. (Anyone interested in writers or writing should check out the terrific essay at the link.)

It's 2002. I'm a technical editor and writer ("Project Specialist") at an environmental engineering firm. Oh. Let's speak it. (Why not? I am too old and detached from it to care or fear.) It was Blasland, Bouck & Lee, or BBL. (Today it goes by something like "BBL, an Arcadis company.") The client needs a chapter on the "fate and transport of constituents" at a contaminated site. We cannot, however, use the words "contaminated" or "contaminant" or "contaminants." In language -twisting the evil propagandist Joseph Goebbels could appreciate, we euphemistically call the pollutants or contaminants "constituents," evoking thoughts of the electorate or at worst neutral players in the drama authored by Mother Nature. I am tasked with writing Chapter 6, if I recall correctly, of a feasibility study (FS), or maybe it's a remedial investigation (RI). There's one problem: I am not in any manner an expert on the fate and transport of anything, certainly not constituents. I read up on everything I can find (articles, websites, in-house technical journals). I enlist the help a brilliant colleague, but he too is not an expert on fate and transport. But no one else wants to help; it is not corporately expedient. In fact, it is de rigueur not to help me. The real corporate expert, out in the Rocky Mountains, could conceivably help but does not, owing to schedule, distraction, indifference, malice, or, what?, his pending sex-change operation. He doesn't write one word to help me but charges 40-some hours to the project, for feck's sake. I can't sleep. My eyes are hollow. I am falling apart, ready to cry at anything or anyone. My therapist sees me in ruins. I work on drafts until 1 a.m. at home. I submit it to the clients. They hate it. My superior hangs me out to dry. That is my fate, transported there by misery and madness.

That was then.

Today, somebody at my current workplace mentioned something about aquifers, and it transported me back to those fateful days. Those former days were the beginning of the end of that toxic job.

Tonight, walking the dog, the sky bright at the horizon, a blue of Caribbean waters deepening into a nightly dark blue denim of dreams and blankets, starlit fabric heralding a creeping absence of day and light, I wondered at the fate and transport of the blossomed and billowing forsythias competing for hue and chroma with the double-yellow stripe in the middle of the park road.

I wondered at the fate and transport of emerald hills carpeted fresh and raw as any dusk in Ireland.

What is my own fate and how will I be transported there?

My mind bubbled with echoes of virility and nubility seen at the mall I just returned from (okay, I'll fess up: that's a highfalutin way to describe my ogling of scantily clad female beauty -- at least scanty compared to the coated cocoons of wintry dress sported round these parts for about nine months of the year).

Fate and transport. We see it all over.

I get home and a silverfish centipede scampers in the dark of the kitchen. I cringe at them. I fear and loathe them. I kill it by stepping on it with my shoes, slightly disappointed the dog or one of the cats didn't see it first to do my dirty work. Then it would seem more, um, natural.

Moments later, in the bathroom off the kitchen, it's a spider. I take a tissue and catch it and toss it into the toilet bowl while continuing with the fate and transport of the not-quite-forsythia-colored streaming of my personal constituents. After earlier browsing through Buddhist books and after buying A Book of Hours illustrated by my high-school teacher John Giuliani, I admit it wasn't kindly to Mr. Spider. Yes, I suppose I could've tossed him or her outside.

But I was in the middle of my own surficial water discharge/recharge cycle.

Nobody's perfect.

Such is my fate.

May this posting transport you to somewhere you have not been to before.

Tschuss.

P.S. As you know, I'm annoyed that the poster up above is missing the comma after wildlife; plus the rest of its punctuation is a dog's breakfast.