What an odd title! What a bizarre combination of images! But there's a reason.

Sometime during my professional career I realized that I was more of an "oilcan" kind of person than a star. It meant looking after and doing the little things that make a team or group run more smoothly, rather than grinding the gears of self-promotion. That includes what I used to call "technical floor-sweeping", the little tasks that matter but that others often prefer not to do. And although that thought came to me while out in the High-Tech world, it had also been true of my earlier stay in academia. Physics experiments depended on teamwork, a smooth meshing of talents and tasks, even more so than out in industry.

What I also learned is that, although the guy with the oilcan makes a team better than a group of competing and clashing stars, that function is usually under-appreciated. Certainly the award of academic tenure is strongly tilted toward the big performers, especially in research, rather than the conscientious teachers. By nature and perhaps talent, I wasn't going to be one of the former.

And what's true of professional situations applies to social ones as well. I suppose the best reward is to have smoothed or resolved some knotty situation quietly without putting oneself in the foreground, but there are some times when recognition or just acknowledgment of one's efforts would go a long way.

The butterfly image is similar, drawing on the "butterfly effect" in chaos theory. My legacy, if any, to the future is going to have to be the sometimes seemingly imperceptible impact on others of someone who tries to live by integrity and pride in one's work in a small way, rather than through some grand achievements. As such, when the time comes, I think that an image of a butterfly would be a fitting symbolic memorial of my life.

There is some precedent - American Indian names are given during coming-of-age and often draw on nature. Most imitators of Indian practices get it totally wrong and give themselves fierce animal names, forgetting famous leaders like "Sitting Bull" and "Red Cloud". So then why should a butterfly not be an appropriate emblem for a man's life?