Tax time has always been about worry, raising money at the last moment, and horror when I finally see the bottom line and how much I owe to the IRS. (I have to withhold more money each month with each new tax year because the taxable percentages keep going up on my pension, apparently not stopping until I run out of pension or die, whichever comes first. And the Texas Teacher Retirement System has told me they can’t interpret the tax tables correctly, so I have to guess on withholding amounts.)
Last year I owed $750. Trump’s 2017 Tax Bill, the gift that keeps on giving… like a reverse Robin Hood, taking money away from retired pensioners like me to give away to wealthy fire-truckers (pardon my almost-French) in large tax cuts.
Fortunately, after borrowing money to pay off the tax bill, rather than having to beg the government for a payoff plan like I did the previous two years, we got a stimulus check from the government. It covered my debt, and I had enough left over to pay off my $580 tax bill for this year.
So, today, my daughter came to me and told me the new stimulus checks have come. $1,400 dollars! And I don’t owe any of it over tax bills this time. That, of course, explains the title for today. Yes, I give hugs when I’m happy.
But, to be honest, I haven’t always been huggable.
I was traumatized for years by the sexual assault I endured and kept secret from the age of ten. I underwent PTSD-like panics whenever someone tried to hug me. It interfered with my first three girlfriends, and even, at times, my parents and grandparents.
How, then, did I ever achieve huggableness? Well, it was a long road.
It began with my little second cousin, I won’t name him here because he may read this blog, and I have no intention to ever embarrass him. I did, however, name one of the characters in The Baby Werewolf after him. He was an essential part of my life when he was in the third grade and I was in my Senior year of high school, twice his age. I befriended him one Fall morning while waiting for the school bus. He was being picked on by one of the older boys, driven to tears, actually. I bullied the bully who was only in Jr. High and much smaller than me. He had run off behind the firehouse and was apparently planning to miss the bus and run home after it left. I talked him into getting on the bus, and I let him sit with me to keep the bully from retaliating.
After that, I had made a friend. He was constantly seeking me out and talking to me after that. He was a real cuddle-bug too. He would sit in my lap or ask me to carry him around on my back. And to my surprise, the touching I couldn’t stand from anybody else did not bother me a bit with him. He would play Monopoly with me and his brother and some other kids. And he would cheat. But he told me not to tell on him, so I didn’t. He laughed at my jokes. He told me who his secret crush was in school. He told me what he knew about sex from watching animals on the farm. (And he probably knew way more than I did.) And he was the first person I was able to hug in eight long years.
Of course, I would eventually figure out that because he was smaller than me, and a boy… there was no sexual tension between us to trigger my PTSD-like reaction.
So, the healing really began with him in 1974. He’s grown now. Wife and family… boys of his own. I’ve seen him briefly, but repeatedly at family reunions. But, unless he’s reading this now, he probably never knew how important his friendship was to me. I can hug my daughter now, totally huggable, because of him.
ege. It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
Catch a Falling Star 
Do Not Crush the Butterfly…
Art on the bedroom wall, with Christmas lights being used as a night light.
Talking to a school administrator the other day about the challenges my children and I have been facing in the last year, I had one of those experiences where you get a look at your own life through someone else’s eyes. “Wow, you have really been on a difficult journey,” he said. I just nodded in response. Financial difficulties, health problems, dealing with depression… life has been tough. But you get through things like that by being centered. Meditation tricks. Things you can do to smooth out the wrinkles and keep moving forward.
I always return in the theater of my mind to a moment in childhood where I learned a critical lesson. My life has been one of learning how to build rather than destroy. It has been about creating, not criticizing.
Electric lights have come to Toonerville, helping to light the darkness.
When I was a boy, I was a serious butterfly hunter. It started when Uncle Don gave me a dead cecropia moth that he had found in the Rowan grain elevator. It was big and beautiful and perfectly preserved. Shortly thereafter, I located another cecropia in the garage behind the house, a building that had once been a wagon shed complete with horse stalls and a hay loft. I tried to catch it with my bare hands. And by the time I had hold of it, the powder on its wings was mostly gone. The wings were broken in a couple of places, and the poor bug was ruined in terms of starting a butterfly collection.
A cecropia moth
Undeterred by tragedy, I got books about butterfly collecting at the Rowan Public Library and began teaching myself how to bug hunt. I learned where to find them, and how to net them, and how to kill and mount them.
I discovered that my grandfather’s horse pasture had thistle patches which were natural feeding grounds for red admiral butterflies (pictured top left) and painted lady butterflies (top right). But if you wanted to catch the rarer mourning cloak butterfly (bottom picture), you had to stake out apple trees, particularly at apple blossom time, though I caught one on the ripening apples too.
The tiger swallowtail was the butterfly that completed my collection, and it was finished when one of my cousins caught one and gave it to me because she knew I collected them.
But then, one day, while I was sitting on a blanket under a maple tree in the back yard with my notebooks open, writing something that I no longer even recall what I wrote, the backyard tiger swallowtail visited me again. In fact, he landed on the back of my hand. I dropped the pencil I was writing with, and slowly, carefully, I turned my hand over underneath him so that he was sitting on my palm.
I could’ve easily closed my hand upon him and captured him. But I learned the lesson long before from the cecropia that catching a butterfly by hand would destroy its delicate beauty. I would knock all the yellow and black powder off his exquisite wings. I could not catch him. But I could close my hand and crush him. I would be victorious after a summer-long losing battle.
But that moment brought an end to my butterfly hunting. I let him flutter away with the August breeze. I did not crush the butterfly. It was then that I realized what beauty there was in the world, and how fragile that beauty could be. I could not keep it alive forever. But it lasted a little big longer because I chose to let it.
So, here is the lesson that keeps me whole. Even though I had the power, I did not crush the butterfly.
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Tagged as bug hunting, butterflies, wisdom