When a Dragonfly Gets Blue

Dysfunction seems to pop up in all kinds of families.

 

         

It was a summery Sunday afternoon of the summer, and the heat pressed him.  It oppressed him, depressed him, suppressed him and impressed him:  thus was he pressed by the heat.  He sat pensively amid the leafy greenness of a lovely old magnolia tree, shaded by a magnolia leaf.  He was a dragonfly, and his name was Newton.

          Newton was an ordinary dragonfly.  I realize that can be a terrible thing to say about anything or anybody -- all of us want to be extraordinary, don’t we??  But the plain and simple truth is that Newton was ordinary, a tiny particle on the tapestry of life, the ordinary tapestry of life against which the extraordinary may contrast.  Additional adjectives about Newton would be pompous and, truthfully, untrue.  He was dozingly, humdrummery, transparently ordinary.

        

         But today in the summer heat, shaded in the magnolia tree, Newton felt extraordinarily blue.  His aloneness was all around him, and he could not believe that any other living thing in the world cared for him.  Beauty surrounded him, but he could no longer value the beauty above the companionship of others.  You see, for a very long time Newton had lived by the nearby pond among other dragonflies and other creatures who knew his name, never venturing from the pond to the outside world.

        There was his mother whom he loved dearly, but who could never resist reciting to Newton a list of his failures, and who had never stopped treating him like a baby instead of a dignified and grown-up dragonfly. There were Newton’s squabbling brothers and sisters who shrilly complained that Newton was so lucky (since Newton was such a good hunter, why didn’t he just give part of his bounty to them, they whined) and who also wanted Newton to settle their squabbles and solve their petty problems.

        Oh, Newton did have some wonderful friends at the pond who helped him learn to laugh at his silly siblings and who shared wonderful times with him.  Newton truly valued his friends and the good times they had, hiding in the rushes and cattails, dozing on the lily pads.  But one day as he took a rare buzzing and swooping excursion past the limits of his little pond, he found a beautiful green place with a graceful magnolia tree, a place with a little fountain, a lovely little garden fairy and nodding flowers -- and most importantly, no dragonflies to whom he was related!!

 

From that moment on, all Newton could do was dream of the lovely and quiet green place; he dreamed of himself in the magnolia tree, drinking in the perfume of the flowers and swaying to the musical rhythm of the gurgling fountain.  Inside Newton the determination to make that dream come true began to grow in strength.

Now, observed Newton glumly, here I am.  With only the whimsical plaster figure of the fairy to talk to, he thought.  His dream had come true, but now the very trueness of it was a great burden.  He missed his friends, the rushes and cattails, the lily pads, his mom and even his squabbling brothers and sisters.  Somehow their shrillness did not seem annoying from his vantage point here in the magnolia tree.  In fleeing from the bad, Newton observed with a long sigh, he had fled from the good also -- and had fled to a place where he was a stranger.

“Whaddyouse doin’ here in my magnolia tree, youse lousy ol’ stupid dragonfly?” snarled a grumbly voice from a branch above Newton, startling him.

But when he looked up to see a short and fuzzy yellow-brown caterpillar with red and black eyes, he was appalled that such a lowly creature would speak to him in such a way.  Newton drew his dignity up around him and spoke with the dignity of a very dignified dragonfly.

“I beg your pardon -- to whom do I have the dubious pleasure of speaking?”

“I’m Lippincott, youse stupid ol’ dragonfly,” the caterpillar sneered.  “Whaddyouse think youse iz doin’ in my magnolia tree?  What’s youse name anyway?   Where’s youse crawl in here from?”

“If you must know, I am Newton, and I am from the pond.”

The caterpillar guffawed.  Difficult to believe, I know, but this caterpillar did indeed guffaw; if he had been possessed of a knee, he would have no doubt, slapped it.

“The pond?!?  Don’ youse mean the swamp?!?  Smelly ol’ skeeter breedin’ hole!”

Newton felt surprised by the surge of anger within him.

“And surely -- er -- Lippincott, this is not your magnolia tree.  Surely it is here for all to enjoy.”

“Naw.  It’s mine.”

“Just who do you think you are -- you -- a short and fuzzy, quite ugly, I might add, caterpillar -- to tell me just where I can be?”

“No thinkin’ about it, stoopud. I’m Lippincott, and dis iz my magnolia tree.”

Newton was outraged, but deep inside, he was also very, very sad; his heart had claimed this lovely place as his, but his heart had not been wise.  Others had seen its loveliness much earlier than he, and although the place did not truly belong to them or Lippincott, neither did it belong to Newton.  As many stinging retorts as he could muster did not change that, and he was silent.

At that moment, strange and foreign sounds emanating from a form standing below the magnolia tree made the Lippincott creature smugly smile a terrible smile.

“Hey, Ma!  There’s a strange dragonfly on Lippincott’s magnolia tree!”

And with a great whoosh, with Lippincott leering from above, Newton was removed from his blueness and aloneless and our midst forever.

There are great lessons to be learned by listening, and I hope that Newton has taught you -- as he has taught me -- that we must learn to find and love the good around us -- that we must work to see the precious that may be obscured by shrillness -- that we must not see running away as the answer -- that those around us who wish to express their love, sometimes cannot and express their need for us by acting needy. When we go to new places, we are indeed strangers in a strange land, and what difficult work it is to shed the strangeness.