Month: July 2005

I’ve been trying to capture a good picture of the Western Tiger Swallowtail for nearly two years now and despite my best efforts the photograph has eluded me.

It’s not that I haven’t seen any of them. Just the opposite. They’re frightfully common around here. I imagine I see one flit past the yard every two or three days through a good part of the summer.

Unfortunately, they just won’t stop flitting from flower to flower long enough to have their picture taken.

Strangely enough, though, I had an encounter of the close kind with one of them last Wednesday night when I went to the park for our Tai Chi class. While waiting for the class to begin, a beautiful Western Tiger Swallowtail nearly landed on my forehead, and, in fact, landed on a leaf not more than a few inches away from me. When I moved closer to examine it, it made no efforts to fly away and sat there serenely as I examined it.

Feeling like the boy in Faulkner’s “The Bear,� I only regretted not having my camera for a moment, too caught up in the sheer joy of experiencing it directly to experience anything else.

After this experience, I really felt that a Swallowtail butterfly soon will trust me enough to allow me the privilege of taking a photograph of it.

Strangely, the day after writing this entry, I stopped to check the herb garden at the Pt. Defiance Rose Garden and almost immediately a Swallowtail fluttered by to visit. Accommodatingly, he flew to some nearby flowers and paused long enough for me to shoot nearly a roll of virtual film. Though I’m still waiting to get the perfect picture I saw at Tai Chi Class, I was delighted by some of the shots I got:

Last night while eating dinner another Swallowtail visited our butterfly bush. Leslie said I should get the camera, but I complained that it would undoubtably be gone before I could go upstairs and get back. After about four minutes, though, I decided to go get the camera. Amazingly the Swallowtail was still there when I got back, and, though, none of these pictures is as good as the one that got away, I did get more pictures I liked:

This New York Times article should probably have me concerned, and if I didn’t already consider myself a “radical” it probably would.

Instead, it makes me hopping mad to think that trying to protect the Constitutional rights of American citizens or trying to protect the environment from polluters makes me a target of the FBI.

Still, it’s hard to believe that if, as the NY Times reports,

The F.B.I. has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union, the leading critic of the Bush administration’s antiterrorism policies, and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace, an environmental group that has led acts of civil disobedience in protest over the administration’s policies, the Justice Department disclosed in a court filing this month in a federal court in Washington.

that my name doesn’t appear in several FBI files.

After all, I’ve been a Greenpeace supporter for years, even becoming a monthly supporter a few years back. As such, I often receive special fund-raising requests from them, including phone calls. I hope the FBI has tapped their phone lines and has to listen to that fund-raising spiel again and again. That would certainly serve them right.

I recently (read that as right after the Bush Administration passed the Patriot Act allowing authorities to check without a warrant what library books we Greenpeace supporters have checked out ) became a contributor to the ACLU, and I have recently signed online petitions to be sent to my congressional representatives.

I think I’m even more outraged as one of those taxpayers in the highest tax bracket in America to learn that the CIA wastes millions of dollars tracking legitimate organizations that employ political power to ensure citizens’ Constitutional Rights are protected and that use civil disobedience to protest the destruction of our environment.

You’d think FBI funds might be better spent tracking a different kind of terrorist, the kind that blew up the subway in England. If they have money to waste, perhaps we had better take a closer look at their budget and see if we can’t find a better way to spend funds than spying on concerned citizens, such as adequately funding inner-city schools.

My friend Mike laughs when I tell him I’m a radical, but the fact that the FBI considers me a serious threat may finally convince him that trying to protect our Constitutional rights and our environment is radical in a conservative world.

If I didn’t already give so much money to other subversive organizations like The Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense, etc., I’d give enough money to both of these organizations to make the FBI certain where my loyalties lie.

It’s hard to imagine a better reason to support these organizations than the fact that the FBI and the Bush Administration consider them subversive. Check out the ACLU online and keep up with Greenpeace’s
current campaigns.

No, despite the summer doldrums and fewer and fewer visitors to my site, I didn’t use that title merely to draw horny teenagers to my site.

Rather, I used it to draw attention to a recent article in the Seattle Times describing how a “13-line verse was abruptly pulled from this year’s [Shoreline High School] magazine after parental complaints about a profane word in its title.” Of course, the “profane word” is never revealed, so the reader is never given a chance to judge for himself how offensive the title really was. I had a better title for this entry, but bowing to Leslie’s and Dawn’s opinion, I self-censored myself, but I suspect that the word was probably more descriptive than my title.

Apparently the subject of the poem wasn’t considered either when it was censored unless parents want their teenage daughters to have as much sex as possible while they’re still young and attractive because “the poem’s author, Zoya Raskina, 17, said her verse was about the pressure teenagers face to have sex and the disillusionment that can follow.”

Not unexpectedly, the poem wasn’t the only thing that was “censored.” District administrators asked “Steve Kelly, an English teacher with the district for 35 years, to step down as magazine adviser.” As a former yearbook advisor, newspaper advisor, and literary journal advisor, I’ve had to deal with more than my share of censorship, including resigning for several years after an infamous yearbook photo taken during a Halloween assembly became a centerpiece in the media coverage of a trial.

Such censorship isn’t limited to publications, though, as I had more than a few parents complain about teaching Catch-22 and Grapes of Wrathin a junior Honors American Studies class. Apparently parents expected their children to see the sanitized version of war where a profane word is seldom heard and the skies are full of American flags brightly lit by the rocket’s red glare at dawn’s early light.

Is it surprising that America repeatedly finds itself fighting the same old wars, and that children find themselves pregnant the same way they got pregnant in the “good old days” when I was in high school and girls never got pregnant, they just faded away?

Sugar-coated lies aren’t likely to produce educated students, though they are likely to appease a highly vocal group of parents who feel it’s their duty to protect the young people of our community from the horrible truths of life, unless of course there’s a profit to be made.

Did I ever bother to tell you why I didn’t start a blog while I was still teaching, or why I probably wouldn’t recommend it to most high school teachers unless they enjoy lying to students and parents alike?

Perhaps the title of this entry merely seemed an appropriate title for an entry letting those who have followed my recovery from prostate cancer know that my testosterone level has returned to its old levels, but, unfortunately, I’m unable to celebrate that return adequately. I guess I’ll have to provide release in a few well-aimed articles.

Such is life and its many joys.

As I browsed a recent batch of photos, I found this shot of Lael, originally shot in color, of course, that I absolutely fell in love with, though I’m not sure why.

Certainly the smile is enchanting, as is her sheer enthusiasm for the game she is playing.

But there’s something else I find attractive, a quality I originally called “Through a Glass Darkly,� a rather sad feeling despite, or perhaps because of, the joy in her face.

Perhaps the scratched, blurred surface reminded me of old photographs of my mother, my daughter, or even myself, as a child.

Perhaps the plastic bubble enclosing her saddened me, a subtle reminder I could never again truly experience the childhood joy she was feeling.