I sit alone on the New Year’s Eve

Shrouded with thoughts of disbelief

A year has come and a year has gone

What seemed to be just a dusk till dawn

As I think about the striking events

My actions, my thoughts and all their contents

I can’t help but ponder upon

All the opportunities forgone

At times I was generous, at times aloof

At times, a comic and a friendly spoof

At times, a procrastinator at best

Wasting my time, letting everything rest

It has to change this time around

With time, our souls and lives are bound

Who knows it might be too little too late

So to seize the moment and to change my fate

I promise myself with a clear resolve

I will change myself, I will evolve

And hold the values high throughout

Like honesty, integrity and hard work, beyond doubt

I will help the needy, console the sad

Attend to the sick and fight the bad

I will give back to the world

From what I am bestowed

I will sacrifice

And take the difficult road

Who knows it might pay off in the end

Who knows if I do make the amends

I’ll sit alone this time next year

Without the worry, the doubt, the fear

If i make a single person smile

I’ll jump to the next year in style

Writer’s note;

How do you move from poetry to prose without being prosaic? I suspect that the solution is to try it once and then keep trying. In my poem I wrote about being “at times a procrastinator at best”. The Butterfly Collector describes, among other things, the consequences of procrastination in a tangible way. Is this a character “flaw”, like Hamlet’s inability to act, and bringing equally grave consequences? Or is it merely a characteristic? I believe that the answer lies in the gravity of the consequences for an individual and for the people around them – while at the same time I will leave you to make your own conclusions. In the meantime, let me share with you a very short story.

The Butterfly Collector

When Nicoletta was about six years old her father gave her a butterfly net. He didn’t know, and Nicoletta couldn’t even imagine, that this simple gift would change the entire course of her life.

It was summer time and she spent her first few days as a butterfly hunter running around the garden, randomly swiping at everything that made the mistake of crossing her path – butterflies, dragonflies, moths, bees. After her first wasp sting she became a little more circumspect in her approach to hunting.

The Alpine Blue was the butterfly which hooked her, at home in Italy when she was 13 years old – a delicate butterfly with blue-mauve wings, tinged at the edges with white. Completely enraptured when she caught it her net, it soon joined many of Nicoletta’s earlier finds in a glass fronted teak wood case with a green velvet lining. It had never occurred to her that netting a butterfly and then pinning it onto a green velvet background was at best, in bad taste, and at worst, unjustifiably destructive.

Nicoletta’s interest in butterflies almost certainly led her to university and a course in Zoology. Probably it was also the influence of her father. He was a painter and saw beauty in everything, and he passed on his appreciation of the beauty in the world to his children. Sadly he had passed away when she was fifteen, but his love of beauty and his love for her remained strongly with her down through the years.

The Palos Verdes Blue is the rarest butterfly in the world. It was believed to be extinct, but a colony was miraculously found in California in the 1990’s. Nicoletta concluded that if there was one colony, then there must be others. And with that, after a few years distracted from butterflies she and her net were back in the hunt. Coincidentally the Palos Verdes Blue bears a rather strong resemblance to the Alpine Blue.

What started as a diversion became an obsession. Like every group with a narrow interest there are specialists and experts and gurus. She started as a specialist and after six or seven years was considered within the small group of “Palos Verdes Blue” chasers as an expert.

Shinzo Tamura was the guru in that field, and as it turned out, something of an evil genius.

Three months ago Nicoletta finished a two year project to computer model possible locations where the Palos Verdes Blue might still survive, based on very old observations on their known habitats, observed by lepidopterists (butterfly experts) in the 18th and the 19th centuries, and extrapolating the habitat preferences of the butterfly to possible modern day locations.

Her work wasn’t secret, she had sought the help of many butterfly colleagues. That said, Nicoletta hadn’t spoken with Shinzo Tamura, they didn’t really see eye to eye, but she had heard through the grapevine that he was following her computer modeling work with interest.

Where Shinzo and Nicoletta differed was in their approach to rare butterflies when they found them. Whereas Nicoletta had realized very early in her career that netting butterflies and pinning them to a board was wantonly destructive, Shinzo had no such scruples and supplemented his academic salary with sales of crucified butterflies in glass cases.

Her computer modeling completed, she summarized the data. The model had predicated three locations with a high probability of finding the Palos Verdes Blue. Nicoletta invited a couple of her best butterfly friends around to celebrate the end of the computer search and the beginning of the physical search, which would bring her to the Palos Verdes Peninsula in California, to Argentina and to a remote area of Canada. The Palos Verdes Peninsula has always been seen as the native or home habitat of this butterfly.

Nicoletta celebrated the end of her project with her friends, and with chocolate cake, one of her great weaknesses and a source of much joy in her life.

The next day she went to the University to give a tutorial, and throughout the day had the feeling she was being followed. On her way home she stopped at the supermarket. On the way back to the car she heard the irritating sound of a car alarm and discovered to her dismay that it was her car alarm and her car. She found a broken window and an empty space where her laptop bag had been sitting. Nicoletta had unwisely left it in open view. She wasn’t worried about the laptop, it was fully backed up and the insurance would cover it. Actually the annoying thing is having to try and clean up the glass – thousands of small fragments which resist the best efforts of a vacuum cleaner to remove them. She called the police and waited. When they arrived and were taking their report an old gentleman walked over and said that he had seen my car being broken into. He described an unlikely car thief – a middle aged “oriental” gentleman in a tweed jacket.

At the time Nicoletta didn’t put two and two together. Then, ten days later she heard from a colleague that Shinzo was in Argentina on a search for the Palos Verdes Blue – and not just in any part of Argentina, but a woodland not far from the Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia – one of the three locations predicted by her computer model.

Nicoletta hesitated over what to do. First she called the police. They sent an officer to speak with her. His view was that she may well be right but it would be difficult to prove that Shinzo had broken into her car and stolen her laptop. He suggested that this was just a turf war between two eccentric academics and said that he couldn’t justify committing police resources to a “butterfly hunt”.

For almost a week Nicoletta hesitated with what to do. Should she fly to Argentina? Was it too late? Was she over-reacting? Could she afford the time? And then it was too late to react.

Nicoletta found out from a friend who was well connected to Shinzo that he had found no Palos Verdes Blue in Argentina and was en-route to California. The following day she finally stopped prevaricating and procrastinating and got herself onto a flight to Los Angeles. From there she rented a four-wheel drive and went directly to the forest where the computer model had predicted a colony of her precious blue butterflies. As she drove along the road leading into the heart of the forest she met a Toyota Land Cruiser leaving the forest, with Shinzo at the wheel. He didn’t notice her, but she recognised him immediately. She pulled over to the side of the road and as she switched off the engine, Nicoletta got a call from a well-known American lepidopterist. Shinzo had apparently spent three days in the forest and had found a single, solitary Palos Verdes Blue, which he had promptly killed and mounted. It probably wasn’t the case, but Nicoletta felt that her procrastination (see poem above) had led to the end of the colony in this forest in California.

This time she wasn’t going to hesitate. She called the only airline that had a direct route to Montreal that day. They were fully booked and the flight left in three hours. It so happened that Nicoletta had been to University with their Sales Director. She called her and explained the situation and called in a favour. Two hours later she was checking in at the first class desk. Nicoletta, lost in her thoughts, became dimly aware of a commotion at a desk further down – it was Shinzo, arguing with the lady at check in. She was refusing to issue him a boarding pass because, although he had a valid ticket, the flight was overbooked.

As the doors of the aircraft closed Nicoletta realised that she was probably sitting in Shinzo’s seat Apparently, thanks to her friend the flight was only “overbooked” for Shinzo. She had a head start.

Arriving in Montreal, she was met by a friend who lectured at the University. Nicoletta quickly showered at her place and then they headed straight out to the lake where her computer model had predicted a colony of these highly elusive blue butterflies.

Arriving at the lake in the late morning, they walked out of the car park in the heart of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and along a path. As they walked through the forest Nicoletta noticed a sunlit clearing off to the right about a hundred metres away. Instinct led her off the path and to the clearing, a clearing full of fluttering blue wings. She had found it, a large and vibrant colony of Palos Verdes Blue.

She now had just a few hours before Shinzo arrived with his nets. Nicoletta went online and reported this astonishing find in every forum we could think of and then drove straight to the department which dealt with ecology and environment in California.

Nicoletta and her friend drove back to the lake with a police escort and a precious piece of paper, arriving just as Shinzo was taking his nets out of the back of his car. Nicoletta walked over to him. She could see from his face that he was at the same time surprised to find her here, and oddly, not very surprised at all.

Nicoletta gave him a curt nod while the policeman explained to him that the government had established a Special Protection Zone for Nicoletta’s butterfly and that capture of the butterfly without a permit carried a penalty of ten years in prison.

Just at that moment four or five blue butterflies fluttered by. It seemed like Shinzo would evaporate, he looked so angry – but Nicoletta and the butterflies had won and he had lost.

Looking back over the events of those few weeks, Nicoletta was distinctly aware that procrastination had very nearly caused a small ecological disaster. It was close!

Two days later Nicoletta was sitting on her flight back to Rome, reflecting on the dangers of procrastination, for her and for everybody….

Only one small thing to change then, avoidance of procrastination, and maybe next year our heroine, Nicoletta, will get a little bit closer to that elusive goal – perfection.

Maybe now was also the time to stop avoiding the discussion about the dream holiday that she had allowed to remain for far too long as merely a dream?