YOUR AD HERE »

Summit Up 6-3-10: Ready to emerge from our Magic Sleeping Bag

by Summit Up
Special to the Daily/Jen Miller
ALL |

Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column that sometimes wishes that we, like caterpillars, could morph into something else and fly away from this crazy place! We were thinking that Wednesday when we watched the Frisco Elementary second graders release their butterflies, which they’d been “raising” since they were caterpillars.

Anyway, think about it: You’re a caterpillar, and that’s OK. You’ve got plenty of legs, you can arch your body in weird ways and crawl straight up a tree. But somewhere in the back of your tiny little mind is the realization that you could be so much more. But, unlike many humans, you really are special – destined, in fact, to go from a creepy-crawly to a flying creature. Now, granted, as a butterfly you can’t go very fast and you’re subject to the vagaries of the wind and the whims of evil birds who will eat you whole without so much as a “by your leave.” But still, flying is a cool thing to be able to do. And, not only that, you get a new coat o’ paint – beautiful wings and what have ya.

It’s a weird world. What if humans, when they turned, say, 18, zipped themselves up into some magic sleeping bag of life and emerged a few months later as something completely different – a pterodactyl, perhaps, or a china cabinet? What if we went in as a woman and came out as a man – or a zombie or a duck-billed platypus or a Bengal tiger? Unlike the caterpillar, what if humans and their magic sleeping bag could set some kind of DNA coding sequence to come out as something completely different – something they’ve wanted to be their entire lives? Or, it could be a roulette kinda thing where, once you zip into the Magic Sleeping Bag, you don’t know what you’re going to come out as: an Emperor penguin, a tsetse fly (that’d really suck) or a lungfish (even worse).



Just wondering. We do like the symbolism of the second graders releasing their critters as they prepared to fly from school for the summer. We wish something like that would happen to us (not the metamorphosis part, so much, but the 75-day vacation. That’s be sweet).

Gotta run, check ya tomorrow.


Support Local Journalism

Support Local Journalism

As a Summit Daily News reader, you make our work possible.

Summit Daily is embarking on a multiyear project to digitize its archives going back to 1989 and make them available to the public in partnership with the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. The full project is expected to cost about $165,000. All donations made in 2023 will go directly toward this project.

Every contribution, no matter the size, will make a difference.