Smithsonian American Art Museum
It is not common to see a senior gentleman directing traffic on the park path where I usually walk every day.
But there he was, stopping the bicycles, ordering the pedestrians to stop and divert their course.
When it was the turn for my daughter, granddaughter, dog and I, to cross this kind of checkpoint, we could see that this good Samaritan was protecting a bright green caterpillar, which was trying to cross the road perpendicularly.
Yes, that’s Canada.
We stopped to watch the little worm crawl slowly, for what seemed an infinite distance. Xenon’s paradox came to my mind, the one that says that, since you have to get halfway, and then halfway of the halfway, and so on ad infinitum, it is impossible to get anywhere in a finite time. Something like that.
My daughter decided to help and proposed a solution to this philosophical problem.
She took a leaf from the ground, put it in front of the caterpillar, who climbed without hesitation onto this magical flying carpet which took her, in a flash, to the greenery on the other side of the road, without the risk of being run over.
The kind gentleman thanked us on behalf of the future Monarch butterfly, according to him.
We continue on our way with a smile and a feeling of pure and diaphanous happiness.
We even started singing.
Soon, a new little butterfly will be fluttering around our meadows.
Who knows, maybe one day she will visit my garden to say hello. I am sure that, from its gentle vibrations, I will recognize her.
After this little miracle in our day, the world definitely seemed to all of us like a better place.
“No act of kindness,
no matter how small, is ever wasted”.
Aesop
Leonor Henríquez (Caracas, Venezuela) Civil Engineer by training (UCAB 1985), writer and apprentice poet by vocation. From her time in engineering emerged her Office Stories (1997), another way of seeing the corporate world. Her latest publications include reflections on grief, Hopecrumbs (2020) (www.hopecrumbs.com) and “The Adventures of Chispita” (2021) (www.chispita.ca) an allegory of life inside Mom’s belly.
Today she shares her “impulsive meditations” from Calgary, Canada, where she lives.
leonorcanada@gmail.com