220. The Lepidopterist

A friend of mine has a brilliant comic strip blog called allergic to umbrellas. About a month ago, he said his blog was going to host a Guest Artist Week and he asked some of his artist friends to contribute work for this. I felt honored to be invited to contribute because he's a sharp guy with good taste (and I'm not just saying that because he asked me to contribute).

Anyway, it's been over a month now and I'm not sure what happened so I figured I'd just post the story on my blog.

And so I present...


The Lepidopterist

What else could he have done? With all the traffic on the street, Gavin wasn't even going the speed limit of 25. He saw the basketball enter the street from the sidewalk, out from an alleyway, and before he could make the connection between ball and boy, the child single-mindedly appeared in the street after the ball. The child didn't even have time to turn and see his SUV before it muscled over him - beating him down like a playground bully. There was only the slightest squeal of tires but it was too late even before his foot bore down on the brake pedal.

Screams and yelling, hands waving and finger pointing followed. There were stares - gazes angry, disbelieving, shocked, and scared. All this energy trained on him, his SUV, and the child, unconscious, trembling in acute shock.

Gavin was a lepidopterist - a scientist who specializes in the study of butterflies, moths and similar insects. He was on his way to a lecture and presentation at a private elementary school. In the back of his SUV was a box containing a dozen monarch butterflies - Danaus plexippus.

These butterflies lay their eggs on the milkweed plant. They feed on this plant and their bodies glean and store bitter chemicals known as cardenolides from its sap. Any given bird will only attempt to eat a monarch caterpillar or butterfly once because even if it can get past the bitter, pungent taste, the endless vomiting that follows will drive home the point that this insect, defenseless as it appears, is not to be reckoned with.

As the din of the crowd grew, Gavin was stunned. What's the protocol in a case like this? As a man of science, he knew that there were ways that things were done - procedures that both maintained order and ensured repeatable, verifiable experimental results - without which science could not go forward. This kind of deterministic certainty crept into every area of his life and while it made for a quiet, peaceful life, it also induced a kind of paralysis in unfamiliar situations, and certainly, this was one of them.

Questions, questions, questions. "Should I back up? What if the child is behind the front wheels? Should I get out? What will this do to my insurance? Can I be held at fault? What about the lecture at the school? Who are all these people? What will I say? Why now? Why me? Why do things always go so wrong? Oh my God, did I just kill a child?"

The questions continue to rattle through his mind and he lets them bounce off of one another. As if by instinct alone, he leaves the engine running, opens the door, gets out of the SUV, and braces himself before bending down to see what he's done. There are already a couple of bystanders looking underneath the chassis. They are calling out to the kid and he takes this to be a good sign until he sees the pool of blood darkening the asphalt.

One of the wonders of the monarch butterfly is its migration pattern. In the fall, these tiny insects make their way from Canada and the northern most of the United States down to the slopes of Sierra Madre Del Sur in southern Mexico - a journey of over three thousand miles. What makes this journey even more miraculous is the fact that the butterflies who migrate north are not the same ones that migrated south the year before. In fact, the entire round trip can encompass up to seven generations, most of whom mate and die along the northern leg of the journey. As the end of summer approaches, a special generation of butterfly is born - one whose life-span is up to eight times longer than that of their grandparents. This is the generation that makes the long haul down south to escape the bitter winter cold.

Of course the big mystery is how this last generation knows the way back to the homeland of their great-great-great-great-grandparents - a place they've never seen before. Gavin likes to believe that butterflies pass the secrets of this journey on to their offspring through song. He imagines the butterflies singing to one another about an odyssey of epic proportions as they fly ever northward. And he pictures the southbound flyers marveling at the way the song that they've had ingrained into them through repetition guides them on their way back to the mountains of Mexico.

Peering under the vehicle, Gavin can see that the boy is still alive but in very bad shape. He has no medical training but he can see signs of trauma everywhere along the boy's misshapen body. Another man runs up to the scene and introduces himself as a doctor - an oncologist, but a doctor nevertheless. He accesses the scene and barks an order to Gavin telling him to back his car up slowly.

He nods and gets back into his SUV. He puts it in reverse and backs right into the car behind him - a subcompact hatchback. Its hood buckles as crumple points in the front end give way. Gavin guns his engine and manhandles the little car back against its will. The woman behind the wheel doesn't sound her horn but she doesn't lay off of her brakes either. Satisfied that he's made enough room for the doctor and child, he parks his SUV halfway on top of the lady's hood.

He's done all that he can. There's nothing left to do but to let the life of this accident play itself out. It's all out of his hands. He shuts off the engine and watches the drama unfold in front of him through the window. Fire trucks, ambulance, police, first responders. Questionings, reports, no accusations, thankfully, but the guilt comes anyway. His cell phone rings. It's the school asking him where he is.

The details of butterfly migration are a mystery. The metamorphosis from larval form (caterpillar) into pupa and finally into butterfly is nothing short of a miracle. Once encased in its chrysalis, a radical, comprehensive transformation takes place. It begins with a process called histolysis which breaks down much of the caterpillar's tissue into a kind of gelatinous soup. Not everything is destroyed. Spared are the internal organs as well as a special set of cells called histoblasts. These cells are instrumental in building new body parts - legs, compound eyes, antenna, and proboscis, to name just a few - through a process called histogenesis. The wings actually begin developing from the first larval stages. Much of the wings' formation occurs within the caterpillar's body, but during metamorphosis, they grow exponentially and adhere themselves to the outer cuticle.

Once this transformation is complete, the (now) butterfly breaks through the chrysalis and emerges wet with crumpled wings. It clings to what's left of the chrysalis as it pumps hemolymph (insect blood) through its body, basically inflating its wings. After about an hour (depending on surrounding temperature and humidity), the wings harden into a rigid structure that enables flight. The horny butterfly takes to the air, eager to migrate and to mate.

Two weeks later, Gavin pays a visit to the boy's house bearing one small gift. His bruises have faded and broken bones are mending behind plaster casts. No hard feelings between any of the parties involved. Gavin sets a small cage on the boy's bureau. He points out the tiny green chrysalis attached to a twig and tells him that if he listens quietly and closely enough, he just might hear traces of the song of migration - a tune three thousand miles long.

(as always, you can see my other short stories at The LoneTomato Sauce)

219. movie recomendation: Little Miss Sunshine

Hard to believe it's been over one month since I've posted anything. I started a couple entries but never got around to finishing them, let alone posting them.

But I'm back.

At least for this entry...we'll see what happens henceforth.

"So where've you been?"

Well, I suppose I could say it was this or it was that but truth be told, I just didn't feel I had all that much to say. No, that's not the complete truth. The gritty truth of the matter is that I was lazy and unmotivated (not necessarily in that order).

And here's the strange thing. After a couple weeks or so, it got to the point where I felt like I had to have some kind of grand revelation in order to start posting again. See, before I stopped, one of the reasons I was posting so much was because of momentum. What I mean is, posting on a regular basis became something I felt like I need to keep up with just for the fact that I'd been doing it so consistently. On top of that, I knew people were reading and so I didn't want to let them down and so I kept posting even when I didn't feel like it.

And then when I stopped posting, it was like the opposite. I didn't post because I wasn't posting and it felt strange to just start up again without some kind of big epiphany.

But maybe all it took was a movie so amazingly great that I had to write about it.

And so here I am, writing and posting again.

"So what's the movie already!"

Okay, it's this little independent film called Little Miss Sunshine directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (who, judging by what's written about them in the Internet Movie Database, were both music video directors before this film). The film's cast includes the always brilliant Greg Kinnear, Alan Arkin, Toni Collette, and Steve Carell.

But the true star of the movie is the writing and the story and all the unexpected moments of tenderness amid chaos. It's basically a road trip movie about a highly dysfunctional family trying to get from New Mexico to California so that their daughter/sister/neice/granddaughter can make it to a beauty pageant. And I know that sounds like a pretty drab pitch, but the genius is in the details - how the characters crash in to one another and the surprising sparks of tenderness and grace that come out of their conflicts.

I used to be a BIG movie guy. There was one year where I averaged at least one movie per week for about a year and a half. But for the past few years, I'm on a roll if I see one movie per month (and that includes both rentals and at the theater). Two reasons for the decline. First, one of the two main art-house theaters morphed into a $1 movie joint and second, I've just found that the general quality of recent movies (even promising art-house/independent flicks) ranges from mediocre and predictable to downright waste of time.

On the one hand, you have big, blockbuster movie franchises that either use flashy special effects to distract you from noticing all the holes in the plot or try to wow you with the over-used M. Night Shyamalan-style surprise/twist ending. And then on the other hand you have your artsy fartsy indie films that condescendingly mock middle-class suburbia (yeah, I'm talking to you Mr. Dynamite) or paint such a dark, bleak, cynical portrait of life that you want to slit your wrists during the end credits (see my review of the Woodie Allen film, Match Point in blog 158).

Is it just me, or does it seem like movies these days are just trying too hard?

Little Miss Sunshine has renewed my faith in movies. It's tough and tender and strangely believable considering how odd it's cast of characters are - a Proust scholar who tried to kill himself, a teenager who has taken on a self-imposed vow of silence after reading Nietzsche, a horny geriatric who snorts heroin, a failed motivational speaker, the mother who tries to keep this family together, and a little girl trying to get to her beauty pageant. It sounds like a cheap gimmick (put random characters in a VW bus and watch what happens) but what's great about the movie is how the core humanity of the characters bleeds through their angular exteriors.

And maybe the most amazing feat of the film is the way it ends happily, but in a way that's both unexpected and utterly satisfying. We live in such a cynical, skeptical society that happy endings that don't feel fake or cheap or kitschy are nearly impossible to pull off, but Little Miss Sunshine does just that.

Definitely one of my two favorite movies of 2006 so far (the other one being Inside Man - see blog 186).