A Laker’s fan to a radio man on how he feels about his team:

“I get so excited, I got butterflies down my neck!”

Poetry in picturesque places gives me a longing for life, well within and far beyond reach.

Mary, a mother, wife, friend to all, passed away this week.  She was to me a distant acquaintance whose life, I thought, would purr along into peaceful old age.  She was a true mensch.

We know there are all kinds of people, right?  On the one extreme you have the teams-of-one variety, who suck the living daylight out of you to focus it on them.  Longevity teaches you to move to warmer climes.  Which doesn’t take too long if you’ve met a class act, like Mary.  Such a person lays out a blanket big enough for you and all your weary bones; you stand there dripping on her generosity; she beams at you from someplace peaceful, ego free.  And the light she brings is everywhere.

You carry this to the next place, and the next, and in the course of time, you learn how to be a more hospitable soul.

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a lovely film in many ways, the old-young boy asks why people have to die.  “So we know how much they mean to us,” the answer comes.  This is cold comfort.  Given a choice, I’d rather bumble along with my loved ones, imprecisely prescient of their preciousness than, suddenly enlightened, find them gone.

So much for Hollywood treacle.  I don’t want death, or Hallmark, to line my cloud with silver.  But death is, I think, in some careful ways, a gift.

Even a distant loss - exemplary person from the past, strangers in a downed 447 - brings a jolt of sobriety to the living.  Sobriety in the sense the non-drinker uses it to think clearly and feel honestly.  It punctures ego bubbles, lets the blather out.

With the blurbosphere lapping at our heels every waking nanosecond, it’s hard not to be opinionated by the opinionizers, taking sides with relish.  Everybody’s on the judgement block, from politicos to sports jockeys to corporate hacks.  It’s easy to forget that we, in the end, are of the same team.  Death reminds us, with each sobering loss, that unchecked ego serves no lasting purpose.  Compassion is the generative seed, the photosynthesis machine, the metaphor of metamorphosis.

While butterflies, ridiculous and rampant, tumble down the neck.

Public domain painting Carl Spitzweg, The Butterfly Hunter