so that only tentative and
confused phrases stumbled from his mouth. In the midst of his
babbling, though, he could see, in the welling dew of the woman's
eyes, the tenderness of regard he had inspired.

As other humans, too, began to grow weary of the expectation of
constant perfection in their relationships, scenes similar to this
one began to be repeated with increasing frequency. A loose shoe
lace, a chipped fingernail, a shiny nose--all gradually became
sources of romantic and emotional attraction, and those very
characteristics that had before been viewed as defects soon came to
be seen as emblems of the truly and desirably human, as guarantees
of that unique inner fire that no amount of perfectly crafted
plastic could equal.

The word "human" now began to be associated with the genuine, the
natural--and the beautiful. It became not uncommon to hear a young
lady remark to her admirer as he gently put a flower in her hair,
"Oh, what a human thing of you to do." The word "humakin," on the
other hand, began to imply something slickly unrealistic or
laughably fake and was often pronounced with a sneer.

At length, having rediscovered the amorous appeal of their
distinctives like freckles and missing buttons and the inability to
refold road maps, the humans began to marry each other again. It
wasn't many years before a young pledge of one of these new
relationships was heard to ask in a tone of frustration, "But Mommy,
why must I have a crooked tooth?" To which the mother replied,
"That's so I'll always remember how truly beautiful you really are."

The Caterpillar and the Bee

A bee, flying proudly around the garden, approached a caterpillar
sitting on a shrub. "I don't know how you can stand to be alive,"
the bee said. "I'm valuable to the world with my honey and wax, I
can fly anywhere I want, and I'm beautiful to behold. But you're
just an ugly worm, not good for anything. While I soar from bloom
to bloom feasting on nectar, all you can do is creep around and
chew on a stem."

"What you say may be true," replied the caterpillar, "but my
Maker must have put me here for some purpose, so I trust him
for my future."

"You have no future," said the bee. "You'll be crawling through the
dirt for the rest of your life. If you ask me, you'd be better off
choking on a leaf."

Sometime later the flowers in the garden woke to find that the bee
and the caterpillar had both disappeared. All that th