Pegasus1999

Bicycles and Butterflies
Rachel Ellis
Second Place, Prose
Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College

It was a dark and stormy night.  Well, maybe it wasn't totally dark.  I mean, it wasn't like you couldn't see your hands in front of you face or anything like that, but it was kind of dark.  Isn't dark a relative term anyway?  Who decides? Who is it that says, "Now this is dark?" OK, fine, it was only about 4:30 in the afternoon.  but, it was rainy.   I guess if you wanted to get really technical about is then I don't suppose there were actual raindrops falling from the sky, but there was a 32 percent chance of rain.  Anyway, enough about the weather. Let's get to the real point of this essay.

    The point is this: remember that scene in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where the gum-chewing girl just grabs a piece of that gum off the huge blueberry, and starts chewing without even asking? And then she blows up into this huge blueberry, and the Oompa Loompas come and roll her away.  Wasn't that scene just amazing? Where do you think they found blue clothes that would stretch that far? While we're discussing Oompa Loompas and other very small people, I have one more question.  Remember that scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy meets all the munchkins? Well, the other day on Ricki Lake or Oprah of some other talk show where the hosts weight fluctuates a lot, they had this reunion thing with some of the original munchkins from the movie.  Isn't it weird that after all these years they still haven't hit a growth spurt?

    This really is totally out of the was, and you may even think that it had nothing to do with the point of the story, but I promise it ties in.  Just the other day, I was driving along, minding my own business, when it hit me.  Not a car or anything life that (although it kinda felt like it). It was the epitome of epiphanies!  What, I asked myself, would the world be like without bicycles? No one would have ever invented those really cool looking hats that slope to a point in the back. People would probably be really irritable because they had to walk to school or work.  How would you have those bike race thingies without bicycles for people to ride on? And what about that guy in the circus that balances on that bicycle with one wheel?

    There is this thing called "the Butterfly Effect."  You may have heard of it. Real life example:  A man takes a bus that runs every ten minutes.  He takes the bus to a train that runs every hour.  If he gets a phone  call as he is walking out of the house, that makes him one minutes late to the bus stop, so he misses his bus and consequently his train, how late will he be to work?  And what is by being late, he misses a promotion or a meeting with the woman that would have been his wife had he no t gotten a phone call that messed up his day and consequently the rest of his life?   This is called "the Butterfly Effect" because supposedly a butterfly could land on a plant and cause a hurricane somewhere else on the earth.

    So here is my point:   If something as small and supposedly inconsequential as a butterfly or a phone call can have such a huge effect on the grand scheme of things, then imagine what not having bicycles around could cause.  Which leads me to ask this question.  The question that draws everything together into a nice little bow . . . What was my point? Was there ever really a point to begin with?  And who would really begin an essay with "It was a dark and stormy night?"