ANYWAY! That was the idea, but then it occurred to me that it's kind of hard to take whales around the countryside in a traveling educational exhibit/circus sideshow kind of thing, so I changed it and after reading a couple of Wikipedia articles about the order Lepidoptera, here we are.
The butterfly exhibit came to my mother's town during the last month of summer in 1965, when she was nine years old. The butterfly man, as he was invariably known, set up shop in the now disused building that was, in better days, her father's furniture store. My mother watched in fascination as the strange man transformed her father's old work and show rooms into well-lit leafy paradises for the dozen of species of butterfly he was keep stored in small wire cages in his truck. First he took out the doors and installed thick plastic curtains instead. Then he installed vents over the door frames that blew down air and kept most of the butterflies from flying outside, and heaters that mimicked most of the butterflies' warm natural climate. Then he strung bright yellow spotlights in the corner so they would illuminate the high ceilings and brought in a great many tropical plants with wide green, rubbery leaves. All of this he undertook alone. He was a solitary man who ran the entire operation by himself, except he let my mother sit at the door and sell tickets for a quarter each. He almost never smiled and while many of the neighborhood children laughed at him behind his back, secretly they were intimidated by him.
The day the butterfly man freed all the insects from the prison he'd built them was the most glorious thing my mother had ever seen, even greater than the huge stained glass windows at the big Catholic church in New Prague. There were reddish golden monarchs, bright blue iridescent Morpho hecubas, brown owl butterflies that were as big as my mother's hand, and swarms of others and they all fluttered about the room and eventually landed on the walls, the floors, the plants, and the banana peels my mother had so carefully set out earlier under the chairs. Parents sent their children to learn from the butterfly man, who was a well-known professor of natural history at the University and occasionally took groups of the younger children to the creek with butterfly nets in order to teach them taxonomy and entomology. The rest of the time he sat in the desk in the corner of the butterfly with a crossword puzzle, occasionally chastising someone for running or for touching the butterflies' wings.
When my mother wasn't selling tickets, she would sit next to the large plants and let the butterflies land on her. She would carefully pick them up by putting her finger in front of their two front legs, and then gently she would push them so they sat on her fingers and looked like gaudy, beautiful rings. She would sit there and watch the other children running and playing and trying to catch butterflies. Once a small child was being chased by his younger sister and in his haste stepped right on a bright blue Morpho hecuba resting on the floor. The children had thoughtlessly run away, but my mother had rushed to the scene of the crime. The butterfly was flattened on the floor. One of its beautiful blue wings was almost torn off. It reminded her of the time when she had broken one of my grandma's china plates, only now the regret was tinged with great sadness. She looked up and saw the butterfly man staring down at her. He was very tall and thin like a rail. His dark eyes and angular face were impassive. He showed her where the dustbin and brush were and asked her to clean it up. She did but felt oddly chastised, even though it had not been her who had killed the butterfly.
Splendid journal. It's mysterious and lovely. I don't recall ever reading a story with such cool butterfly imagery. It has the feel of a fairy tale. Lovely.
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