Our Spiritual Metamorphosis Series

Finally it was back to school on Monday as usual. Gary, my buddy from up the street, Jim, a guy from a couple streets over and I always walked to school, a few blocks away. The three of us happened to be in Miss Black’s class. During our walk that morning I had asked them if they had seen what Gloria had been doing just before we all left the classroom on the past Friday. Gary said he wasn’t really that concerned about Gloria anymore. Jim said that he had just kind of looked in the tank as he passed by on his way out of the room but hadn’t really seen Gloria at all.

I began to tell them what I had observed and then told them I had hurriedly written about it in my journal. Gary and Jim seemed to kind of perk up when I told them about what I had seen going on in the tank with Gloria. We then all became a little more anxious about what we might find as we would enter the classroom a bit later.

When we finally reached the school the three of us made a dash to the closest door, ran down the hall and around the corner to Miss Black’s room. We dropped our book bags near the coat rack and sped over to Gloria’s tank. Looking around through the grasses and all the green foliage we didn’t see anything of her at all. We then looked at the old dry stick Miss Black had placed in the corner. There we saw the most unusual sight. About halfway up the stick was this crusty looking blackish brown thing. I knew it hadn’t been there before. It was oddly shaped and didn’t look like anything Gloria would have been interested in.

About that time Miss Black entered the room. We immediately called for her to come and see what we had found. We began to ask her questions about it all at one time, each of us trying to get her complete attention. She told us to wait until she had sit her belongings down and that then she would look at our discovery and try to explain to us what had happened to Gloria.

When she finally approached where we were and looked into the tank with us she let out a “Woo who!” She then instructed us to go to our desk and write in our journals what we had discovered that morning. That we did as she had asked.

As the other kids started entering the room we began to tell each one or group to look at Gloria. Many of them seemed to have a similar reaction as Gary, Jim and I had. A few of them swiftly moved to their desks and got out their journals. Others just kind of huddled around the tank asking Miss Black what was going on. She told everyone to get seated and that she would share what was happening to Gloria during our science lesson later in the morning. None of us could wait.

Several years later after having moved on from Miss Black’s fourth grade class I found myself in high school biology class. I no longer needed to have explained to me what had happened to Gloria. I had gained quite a bit of knowledge from our science project years earlier. I had a very clear cut understanding of this thing called “metamorphosis.” But yet I have never gotten a solid definition for that term. Tenth grade biology would now give me that information.