Opportunity

Summer is an opportunity to stick your toes or your whole body in the surf to cool off. It's the only time of year that you can do it. So find a pool, river, lake, ocean, or air conditioned restaurant and cool off.

Just think, in another month, we will be checking home heating oil prices and looking for firewood to keep us warm this winter. Home improvement stores will be putting gas grills on sale to make room for new models of snow blowers and sporting goods stores will clear out their summer inventories to stock up for winter sports.

If you think of each season as an opportunity to do something you couldn't do six months earlier, your world will be a much happier place.

Free as a butterfly

Comedian George Carlin once said, "The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity."

The caterpillar really does get a bad rap in life. He (or she) is that creepy little crawly thing with more than 4000 muscles (man has 629) that we see wiggling through our gardens and eating holes in our plants. As it matures, it builds a cocoon around itself and soon emerges as a beautiful butterfly. It sleeps late and gets up when the sun warms its wings. Its destructive nature of the past is gone, and it now sips nectar from the beautiful plants it sought to destroy before.

As I reflect on the words of George Carlin, I can't help but think of how many varieties of "butterflies" cross our paths every day. No one knows how much work and energy it took to make that butterfly. No one knows how many close calls, the crises and struggles that the caterpillar had during its life.

In the end, all we see is the butterfly. Some draw our attention more than others, but each is beautiful in its own way as it flitters from place to place, stopping occasionally for a little sweet nectar.

Heat wave? What heat wave?

It’s hard to believe that just six months ago the heat index was about a hundred degrees cooler than now, but kids don’t care. Our granddaughter, Halle, is just as comfortable at the beach in July as she was here in January with a couple of feet of snow.

Some people always wish for the opposite season, regardless of the season. When it’s warm, they want it cold, and when it’s cold, they want it warm. Others just keep smiling, no matter what the season. How about you?

Top banana

Did you know that bananas are actually berries of the largest herbal flower in the world? According to the Washington Banana Museum (yes really!), we eat 26 pounds of bananas annually, which really isn't much when you think about it. We peel them from the top down or the bottom up. We make, banana splits, bananas Foster, banana milkshakes, chocolate dipped bananas, frozen bananas, banana bread, and we even slice them for our morning cereal.

People who hang out together begin to look and act like each other, and in fact, they seem so attached that they have a tough time separating themselves from the rest of the bunch. We lose sight of who they really are and how they can be used, their unique qualities are lost in the identity of the group until, that is, someone breaks out of the bunch and becomes top banana.

Superman's point of view

"Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!" But, did you ever wonder what it was really like from his point of view? I mean how about soaring through the grand canyons of a grand city forty stories above street level? All you can see below are the rooftops of yellow cabs and black limousines.

Now I don’t mind heights as long as they are safe. I’ve gone up in man lifts, planes and cranes to photograph buildings, bridges and dams, but unlike Superman, I’m always attached. The downside of looking from above is losing sight of people. The higher we go, the smaller and more similar they become. We can no longer hear them. In fact, we can barely see them as they scurry from point A to B. We lose sight of their uniqueness, their personalities, their skills, and who they really are.

The same is so often true in life. The higher that people move in their career or social status, the less significant those who helped get them to the top become. Whenever I was lifted or hoisted up high to look down, I always rewarded the person at the controls, the one who got me there. After all, my life was in their hands, and they could make my ride as rough, or as smooth as they wanted too, depending on how I treated them.

I know it takes some of the “super” out of the “man,” but everyone needs a little help getting to the top. Just don’t forget who put you there.

Need a hug?

Did you ever have one of those Judith Viorst, “terrible, horrible, no good very bad days?” One of those days when you just needed a hug, from anybody! Australian, Juan Mann, actually started a free hugs campaign where he stood on a busy street corner in Sydney and offered free hugs to anyone in need. Within fifteen minutes, he was getting hugs from numerous strangers who were going through some really tough times.

Despite his compassion, he was soon banned from public hugging for liability reasons, believe it or not. But the campaign continued to spread. If you are brave enough and have a strong sense of compassion, do it. Just make sure no one walks off with your watch or wallet after a hug or you will need one yourself.

Maybe that’s why Alexander wanted to move to Australia. He heard someone was offering free hugs after a terrible, horrible, no good very bad day.

Madison Avenue shopper

One of the fringe benefits of photographing in New York City is the joy of photographing people totally absorbed in what they are doing, regardless of what is going on around them. But, we also tend to make judgments about who they are, often assuming the worst.

I found this lady on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan counting her change outside Hermes of Paris. I photographed her because I thought she was a street person who was out of her element, but when I got home and looked at her more closely, I noticed how impeccably dressed she was and the knuckle-to-knuckle gold ring on her hand. She wasn’t out of her element, she was right at home. In fact, the next place I saw her was a couple of blocks away, outside the Ferrari dealership on Park Avenue.

Pursuit

For old time's sake, I spent this morning trekking through four miles of trails at the Bent of the River Audubon Center with about twenty members of the Connecticut Butterfly Society. I thought it was going to be a nice little lecture about monarch and swallow tail butterflies and then go outside and see if we could find a few. But no, these guys were in serious pursuit of catching and identifying anything that flew, except birds.

They could identify every variety of dragon fly and could tell the difference between a male and female orange sulfur butterfly fifty feet over their heads, but because it was a mixed group, I didn't ask what the discerning difference was. I just used my imagination and took them at their word.

The last time I went butterfly hunting was more than fifty years ago for my a ninth grade science project. I think I had a choice of dissecting a frog, collecting rocks, or catching butterflies. I chose to capture butterflies in a net put them in a jar of tetrachloride to die and then stick pins through them to mount each one on a board under glass. I'm not sure how many I really caught, or how many I used from my brother's same assignment six years earlier to fill in the gap.

Busy as a bee.

One thing that has always amazed me about summer, is how many things that we regularly do all fall, winter and spring are cancelled for the summer because "everyone" is too busy. Yes, people take off for the weekends, go on daycations and some are fortunate enough to take vacations, but not everybody.

Some clients say, "Come back in the fall when we are in full swing," but then it's budget time and so they ask if we wouldn't mind postponing our meeting until winter. "Business is slower then," they say, "Besides, our budgets should be approved, and we'll know how much we can spend next year."

Ah yes, that ubiquitous "next year," but as I recall when we went through this same scenario last year, our winter meeting was cancelled because of snow, so we moved it to spring. The spring meeting never really happened as everyone was busy as a bee trying to get their projects done before summer hit when everything gets cancelled anyway.

Next time you see a bee around a plant loaded with blossoms, watch how it moves from flower to flower checking to see if any friends beat it to the pollen. They get frustrated when there is nothing left, but they always move on to the next one, and the next one in a very predictable pattern. They never give up, they just keep on looking until eventually they find the one that the early bee missed. It finally finds the pollen lode, the one no one else saw, because it was so persistent.

As for me, I can learn a lot from a bee. How about you?

The Power of Independence

Today, in 1776, fifty-three brave men representing thirteen colonies signed their names to the Declaration of Independence and totally changed the way they would be governed.

I would encourage you to read all 1320 words of this historic document and put it into context with our nation's progress over the past 235 years and where we are today. Some will think we are right on track, others will think the document is passé, and some may even want to resubmit it to Congress, but I guess that's what our independence is all about.