Make The Difference

I shall be telling this with a sigh

And that has made all the difference.

So wrote Robert Frost in the final stanza of his oft quoted The Road Not Taken. For many years now, this stanza has been lingering in my mind as I, having now firmly reached middle age (or at least long since past Dante’s “midway on the journey of life”) find myself too frequently asking the penultimate question: “What if?” For while I have now finally set my footsteps to rightly walking the path I think best for myself and my family, I cannot help but wonder what the possibilities would have been had I discovered certain things earlier in life that I have only recently come to know.

For example, the past few evenings I have been thoroughly engrossed in reading Sue Hubbell’s superb book Broadsides from the Other Orders. The book, now sadly out of print but available through used book dealers at a price far below that of its true value, is a guided tour of the life that exists under taxonomic classifications other than our own Order Primates or even the larger Class Mammalia. Hubbell’s focus is the Class Insecta and some of the marvelous and too often ignored taxonomic orders to be found there.

From some of the better known orders, such as Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies), to some of the lesser contemplated and sadly too commonly despised, such as Diptera (true flies) and Thysanura (silverfish), Hubbell guides the reader through what is known as well as what is unknown about these creatures with whom we share our daily lives in ways that may not make everyone psychologically comfortable. She debunks myths, such as the “killer bee” nonsense that has been perpetrated on an entomologically undereducated public by a sensation-seeking corporate media for decades now. She depicts the evolution and development of creatures so much more ancient than ourselves that to them we are but fleeting aberrations of life recently arrived and likely to disappear just as quickly. Most importantly, she does it all in a manner that makes the entire work entirely accessible to everyone with a sincere interest in learning something new and fascinating.

So what does Hubbell’s book have to do with intermittent mid-life melancholia? Simple. Hubbell’s book is the exact sort of book that, looking back, I wish I had read in its original year of publication (1993). Yes, I realize that no one can step into the same river twice nor does a book read at one period in a person’s life have the same effect as it does in another period. The possibility exists that had I actually read it in 1993 that it would have had no lasting effect whatsoever; I may not have even found it sufficiently interesting to complete. Yet what if I had? What might I have been able to begin learning then and what would that mean today?

As our daughter has resumed school for another academic year, I marvel at the possibilities that lay before her. Her entire life is a book she has barely begun to write. It is thus the sacred responsibility of my wife and myself, her grandmother, her teachers, family friends, and all others whose lives touch upon hers to ensure that she be exposed to as many various experiences as possible in order for her to create the chapters of her life with such style and content to ensure that upon reaching her own middle age that she not find herself uncertain when her own reflections upon “What if?” arise in her mind. Having been, to my reflection, less than sufficiently educated myself in a small town school system that employed a few good teachers and some spectacularly poor ones, I lament the possibilities of which I had not the slightest glimmer when I set out to write some of the earlier chapter of my own life’s book. I will do all in my power to ensure that she does not suffer the same challenge.

Thus my admonition to all parents, teachers, family friends, and all others connected to the life of any child: make a promise to yourself and the child or children in your life that you will make every effort to bring to their attention something new, something you find interesting and which you think they might as well. Take the opportunity to mention a book you’ve read, a sight you saw, a place you’ve been, a job you had, or an adventure you undertook. Even if it seems banal or uninteresting to all your adult friends and you question your own sanity for being interested in it yourself, contemplate this: if you keep silent about it, no other person might ever bring to the child’s attention that it even exists. The mere fact of this knowledge alone may be enough to reap untold harvests in years to come.

Peace and good bird watching.