Hello Again

I’ve been away for a while, over a week. I just had nothing that struck my fancy to write about. But now I think I’ll ramble about butterflies and news items and weather and Tiger’s committing to the Masters.

This morning in Arizona is simply gorgeous with clear skies, calm air, and temperature right at 70 degrees. Tiger, Tuffy, and Charlie are out on the patio enjoying it, watching birds and rabbits and the two big yellow and black butterflies that live in our arbor vitaes. I went on-line to see what they were and the best I could find is a yellow swallowtail. They’re a little larger than a monarch and they seem to spend all day flying around and over and sometimes right through the trees on our back property line. Don’t they ever get tired? I know I would. And when I look out at this gorgeous day, I think about the terrible weather in the east, all the continued snowfall, the hailstones, the flooding, the high winds and tornadoes. How lucky we are that we live here.

The main news item has to be about Andreas Lubitz, the German pilot who brought the Lufthansa passenger jet down, killing himself and the other 149 people aboard. The media goes on and on about it, mostly talking about the airlines’ failure to act on Lubitz’s known medical problems, his issues with depression that was brought to light nearly six years earlier. You can bet your bippy that steps will be taken to prevent this from ever happening again. What I keep coming back to is the horror of his act. I keep imagining myself in that plane during the nearly ten minutes before impact, of realizing for ten minutes what would be my last moments on earth, hearing the screaming of my fellow passengers, feeling the nose-down descent and the increased speed, knowing for ten minutes that I was about to die. All right, so he was depressed and suicidal. But did he have to take 149 others with him? His action ranks right up there with the horror of the planes that flew into the Twin Towers. Right up there with the worst serial killers in history. Right up there with Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy. It makes me wonder if I’ll ever want to board another airline.

I was happy to hear that Tiger will return to Augusta next week. He would never agree to enter if he didn’t think he could win his fifth green jacket. And the golfing world will be watching to see which Tiger shows up—the old fist-pumping, growling cat or the chip-chunking pussy cat we watched with disbelief and horror in his Waste Management outing here in Phoenix. You just know that somewhere in the back of his mind he’ll be remembering some of those chunks and blades. But if there’s anyone who could resurrect his game, it’s Tiger. The Tiger haters will be salivating at the possibility of a Tiger embarrassment. The Tiger lovers will have all fingers and toes crossed that he will not only not embarrass himself but will be in the final group on Sunday, maybe even winning that elusive fifteenth major. I’m in the latter camp. I want him to get that nineteenth major before I die.