Dragonfly summer

If summer vacations were organisms, the summer after graduating from college stands out in my experience as a species different from the rest of the summers since I started school. The keynote speech delivered during my college graduation and most of the ones I have known about are all truly inspiring and full of feverish calls to inhabit the future. But the summers before that were of a different texture and imperative. They beckoned me to inhabit my world.

It was a summer after first grade when I discovered the only redeeming quality of the very sad house that my cousins lived in. It was not in the house but outside it. Right outside the backdoor that was always locked with a giant steel latch was where I consciously took my first steps to inhabit and discover life that bypassed the interpretation of adults. It was filled with giant trees and glorious fern that glowed in sunlight. Round boulders sat on the land in numbers and concentrations that made them look like petrified spectators of some slow, continuing life sport. It was not long before I noticed that there was a presence there too of a species that proved too ubiquitous to ignore. They were dragonflies and I wanted them. I thought catching them would enable me to look at them more closely and more importantly, give a six-year-old some power inherent in a feat involving the slaying of any kind of "dragon."

Well, dragonflies really looked like dragons that fly. A close look at one would make you immediately forget that many of them are only an inch or two in size since they have eyes that protrude which magnify their presence to the close observer. I started to catch some with my then four-year-old brother whom I had assigned to hold our portable glass abattoir for our catch. To catch a dragonfly, you have to tread ever so lightly and catch its wings between your fingers in a wink’s time. The bulging eyes of the dragonfly see in all directions, having as many as 28,000 facets, reflecting light that many times, far more than a diamond. Dragonflies evolved from their jungle ancestors 250 million years ago and now come in 250 species found worldwide and known to be among the best acrobatic flyers. Catching dragonflies then I learned the value of stepping resolutely without crashing and to recognize the line between being agile and being rash. I also learned focus, setting my sights almost without blinking on a resting dragonfly in order to catch it. Returning from dragonfly land and into that sad house through that backdoor, I felt like I had gained new eyes, new ways of seeing, new ways to inhabit my world.

High school summers were almost devoid of any outdoor adventures. But it was in one of those summers that I knew what "loss" really was and how "guilt" really felt. It happened one day while I was sitting out on the terrace by myself in a garden. That garden had plants that my mom painstakingly trimmed then in a way that little girls’ hairs were neatly tied back with oppressively tight clips and ribbons. There were no fuzzy, tentative looking shrubs in our yard. If you were a plant there, you either bloomed and agreed to mom-issued standard floral trim or were uprooted and set ablaze every afternoon. But one of the neighbor’s chicks had to wander into our garden and start to peck on the plants and mess with the soil. I tried to shoo it away but it kept ignoring me, maybe because it was a chick and chicks do that. But I did not know that so to scare it, I grabbed a stone and threw it across to hit the concrete fence. But the stone ricocheted, in fact, it did several times, then it hit the chick and killed it. I remember being frozen on the pebbled platform where I sat. I immediately called my then 10-year old brother to help me resuscitate it. But I had killed it. He realized how terrified and disgusted I was with myself for what I have caused and decided that it was good material to blackmail me with for the rest of my life. It would have worked had I not reminded him of what he did to the dragonflies of our childhood.

College saw summers that screamed for personal independence and a larger world to inhabit. With the friends I now still have from that time, we went up north and confronted a beach breathed into with a wind so wild that sand swirled around us and touched our bodies with pin-like indentions. One trip that stood out in one of those summers was with one of my closest friends where we started out following the mountain trail of the Stations of the Cross but ended up being lured by the rainbow instead. We literally pursued the promise of a rainbow and sat at what we thought was at the edge of it and looked at life in all its splendor from up there. In a lot of ways, that rainbow moment then felt more like what a graduation really meant.

It has been more than 16 tropical summers since college graduation. I am not sure if I am living the kind of life my former mentors meant when they called on us then to inhabit our futures. But I know that I try to know where I am all the time, to inhabit my world, now.

I remember a graduation speech. It was delivered on nursery graduation day by a four-year-old, written for her by her father. It was a speech about mindful little steps in knowing your world, in your time, that would later on drive leaps in understanding so required later on in life. The father later acknowledged that the unforgettable statement of Apollo’s Neil Armstrong inspired that speech he wrote for his daughter. The same questing spirit to know the moon touched the girl whose quest started with dragonflies.