Free Honeybee by Naomi Shihab Nye Page A

better than the current moment, right? The moment we are living in may be lovely, but if we “can’t wait” for some other time, do we miss it? We are honeybees in our own lives. But we forget.
    Â 
    Antonio Machado, the brilliant poet from Spain, dreamed a beehive in his heart could turn even flaws into something tasty. This interests me a lot. One thing becoming another, in the tradition of alchemy…
    We are trained to work for success, but failures, mistakes, or disasters may lead us in intriguing new directions. As a young man, Rudolf Staffel forgot to sign up early for a painting course in Mexico and was stuck taking the pottery course. His whole life swerved. He became one of the great ceramic artists of the twentieth century.
    Tim Duncan, the star of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, was a swimmer when he was growing up. He practiced all the time. But a hurricane devastated the pool on his home island of St. Croix. It wasn’t his own failure but the pool’s demise which helped lead him to huge success in a different sport.
    Are the honeybees cooking something up behind the scenes? How many writers or artists have said they stumbled into their favorite works when something else they were trying to create didn’t succeed?
    Â 
    In Holyoke, Massachusetts, a vintage restaurant called Nick’s Nest has been serving hot dogs, baked beans, potato salad, and popcorn since 1921. The slogan of the restaurant is “The Nest of Delicious.” When my friend and I saw it one day, as we sped by in the rain on our way to eat in another town, I shouted, “Stop! I have to see that place! Look, it’s totally old-fashioned!”
    She said, “I thought we wanted Indian food.”
    We stared at the menu on the wall. My friend said, “See, they serve mostly hot dogs and you’re a vegetarian…. I don’t see any tofu pups on the menu.” She was right. There was no entrée to suit me. We werein a vegetable curry mood. But my eyes drank in the countertop, the funny signs, the little booths with old jukeboxes still attached to the tables, and I knew, even though we didn’t eat there, I would remember Nick’s Nest forever. (Luckily another friend has now sent me a Nick’s Nest T-shirt, so I can belong to it in spirit anyway.) Drinking it in . That’s when we really live. Dipping and diving down into the nectar of scenes. Tasting, savoring, collecting sweetness…if you’re in Holyoke, would you please go eat there for me?
    Â 
    My niece in Australia told me that the students in her university class were required to read the blog of an Iraqi citizen and write about it before they could graduate. She chose a girl who is now fifteen writing under the pseudonym Sunshine. I began reading Sunshine’s blog too. I love the way she writes about details of her life—her friends, the books she is reading, her activities and memories. Life is so difficult since the war started, but still she ends her entries with lines like, “Try not to lose hope.” She wishes she could live the way kids in other countries live, without so much constant violence surrounding them.Sunshine has become my personal hero, drinking deeply out of the moments she is given, even when she wishes they were different moments. So much is passing so fast….
    Â 
    My husband’s cousin’s husband, a man named Dee, who lives in Houston, recently sent out an e-mail survey asking people where and when was the last time they had seen a lightning bug. He remembered sitting on his Texas front porch as a boy, seeing hundreds of lightning bugs blinking around him. I had wondered about the lost lightning bugs over the years myself, and blamed their disappearance on pesticides. Many young people in the United States have never seen one and don’t know what they do. (Why aren’t the mosquitoes disappearing, by the way? Are they so much heartier than lightning bugs