How is it, I still wonder, that such an event as that one -- spent in a frightening basement with bizarre unexplainable thoughts and events pounding off of one another like waterfalls in the rivers of the human heart -- still rattles me as the very saddest day I've yet to experience? Magical? Oh, yes, indeed. Did I question EVERYTHING that I even thought I knew before then? More than a million times. Do I still remember seeing Sidney flutter the way "he" did (with no strings anywhere on him because, believe you me, I checked) and thinking that life was a thing that seemed boundless and made no sense in the most dizzying and wonderful way that I had not even dreamt about it seeming before? Certainly. But *just like that* something fiercely patterned within me changed. There is quite a rigid map to even the most keenly observant innocence, make no mistake about that. My map had been, with only a snip and a strange smile 4 feet away, altered permanently. And lost forever. I was on a path, in seconds, where I was left to grieve my childhood as I'd known it. I was growing up. Growing out of what I'd been. Yanked from the safety of my head and my imagination by a butterfly made out of silk pajamas. Seeing it happen hauled me into the high-wire act of "becoming a man". And I knew, just then, I had to forever make a choice whether that direction would be a life of scary underground phantom *nothings*. Or one of unbelievably possible simple endeavors that, by mere virtue of the passionate belief placed behind them, could become places of real and possible (and apparently not-to-be-categorically-explained) *somethings*. I remember feeling like a lucky (suddenly not nearly as smart as I thought I was) 12-year old, too. Because of a "simple" mind  [which wasn't] and a pile of scraps left over from old clothing [which was much more than just that]- and even being given the option of knowing that, behind every mud-splattered window that still let a little light in -or- scraped knee that really might be less a wound and maybe more an interrupted river? I had been given maps to consider that many people have to find much later in their journeys. If ever.
   And I so vividly recall sitting there, looking at George. His somewhat blank stare so layered and empowered, as he nurtured young Sidney to perfect an entirely peculiar maiden voyage. And, oh! what a voyage it was, too. He fluttered unsuccessfully more than once, crashed without a bit of grace into that bare light bulb, flopped (alarmingly) back down to that unyieldingly solid cement floor. But George nudged. Sidney stretched those wings, and tried again. Pretty soon he was soaring like he knew what he was doing. Like he knew where he'd come from? Like he just knew it's not so much about where you land or the obstacles that exist. It's all about how you steer as you get there. Sidney was, fully and magically (and all in just 15 minutes), alive! And George didn't make "him" that way because somebody told him he ought to. George had done it because, as I'd heard him say more than twice during that magnificent summer:
   "You just have to notice what needs done, Ellis. And then just get busy figuring out how to do it. You can. If you really want to..."
   And here I am, ten years later. Studying like a crazed fool (always trying to figure out, it seems, if it really "needs done"). Learning Science. And Math. I decided to try becoming an engineer and will very soon have a paper calling me one. I don't fit into the rest here at school so well, though. I think it's because I understand what an engineer really IS, at the heart of it. A retarded man with an uncomplicated heart by the name of Göran basically summed up the whole field of endeavor, for me. And, be it good or bad, I've learned "down" since knowing him. Given that, it's all a much easier project, quite frankly. I won't tell you what finally happened to George Thunderhack or his lovely mother. Let's just leave it that sickness (something George could not repair or UN-create) found their family and George had to move away after just that one summertime in Ohio. And, as I was afraid might happen, I never heard from him again. The last time I looked at him he smiled and said nothing. But his expression said it all. George Thunderhack had determined, using a keen eye and a simple appraisal of it, that I was *fixed*. Thank God one of us thought so. And thank God even more it was him that did.

   So I leave you to ponder this tale I've laid before you now. I suggest you ask yourself, without complication, whether or not you believe even a word of it. It's really up to you, after all. And, anyway, I am just a young man here on the University campus lazing away a solid two hours between political academics and equations that try to explain everything. Just me, the future, my sentences and my interpretations of a day at the moment. And a visitor just landed on my knee, too. A fuzzy little thing ... pink striped wings and lime green legs. With a blinding white pipe cleaner holding him together as he flutters about, looking around. And [*sigh*] the joy of it ~ real as real can be, my wayward visiting butterfly. Even though, try as I might to find one, not a textbook anywhere would validate him...

   Not that I worry about such things, mind you. His being here is validation enough for me.