Butterfly For Breakfast

It is day two of my return to Italy. I wake up at 645 a.m. in my hotel room in Milan. It is early and I head down for a walk through the morning of the Italian spring day. I try to recall what day it is, not certain whether it is today… or yesterday! I check my i-Phone and find that it is indeed still yesterday, and I’m happy that I have not lost a whole day to my jet-lag while I was sleeping.

Last night, jet-lag hit me over the head with a pillow full of lead wanting to playfully engage me in a pillow fight around 8 p.m. Jet-lag is oblivious to the fact that you cannot start a pillow fight with a lead pillow especially, if this is the first hit in the game. So jet-lag sits patiently on the end of my, bed waiting for me to stir and take up the fight. But all I can do is lay there and begin to droll into my pillow while I surrender to losing the battle but, hopefully, not the war.

I awake some 10 hours later, hungry and alone. (Jet-lag, it seems, has gone off to join one of the many Japanese tourist groups who are checking in or out of the Hotel.)

As I step out into the soft pastel light of the Italian morning, I am greeted by a shape that looks so familiar to me that I begin laughing to myself as I bend to pick it up, to see if I am not still dreaming.

It is my old friend the butterfly, this one made out of leather with a shiny bronze/sliver type coating on one side. I have found it facedown, with it’s white backside up. (I begin laughing harder as I find it in its Back Side of Wonderful pose.) A black elastic band runs through its middle, but has been cut.

I have no idea where it has come from; I have never seen this particular brand of Butterfly before. I know I just must pick it up and convince my swollen (from the jet-lag) fingers to take both ends of the elastic and tie a knot into it, completing the circle and, in a sense, its journey. I slip it on my left wrist.

I watch the street sweepers with day-glow green plastic brooms and matching safety vests clean up the sidewalk out in front of my hotel. One lady seems a little perturbed at me, as she was no doubt going to sweep up my little winged friend. before she finished and headed to the waiting garbage truck and her cigarette break with her fellow Sweeps.

I give her a look like, sorry lady but if you knew the relationship I have with butterflies and ironically with SWEEPING, the only way you are going to get this little guy into the glowing green bristles of your broom is if I happen to fall dead at this precise moment and you take us both with you to your waiting truck! He is with ME!

I am reminded that since today is only Wednesday, tomorrow I travel to Rome (by train), and then onto Pescara (by SUV), through the earthquake ridden country of the latest natural disaster. The earthquake in this small region of Italy claimed close to 300 lives in a few fateful moments. This is the region where I will be working for the next three months. It is to host the Mediterranean Games at the end of June, and we are to begin Auditions there this weekend for the Opening Ceremonies.

Yesterday we planned out a strategy to make up for the lack of people who will show up for the auditions. We are mindful that even for those who escaped that early morning mayhem, 300 people killed in such a close-knit area means that no one escapes the tragedy. Everyone knows someone who was not so lucky.

I told my team about the unnatural disaster of 9-11 hitting on the day before we started our audition series for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics back on September 12th 2001, and how we had to then, as we must now, find a way that is respectful and honest to move forward with any and all plans, to honor those who cannot any longer.

It is the responsibility of the living to do just that: LIVE. I am nervous about heading to the area tomorrow, yet now, with my little buddy securely tied to my wrist, I know that I am in the right place at the right time. I can handle the burden of being one of life’s’ survivor,s and help my good friends the Italians to bring Joy and Honor to a place that has seen way too much sadness in the past week.

Let’s go, little buddy. We have work to do.