"Rhythm......"

Just before Christmas break this past year, circumstances occurred wherein our particular Spec-Ed unit was, more or less, reshaped in several ways. A major part of such change was the insertion of a new teacher, a lady in retirement, but still working as a substitute, filling vacancies as they came to her, her hyper-enthusiasm for ministering to these kids over-flowing into the rest of us. Crafts were her passion. Technology and trying to find her scissors beneath two or three piles of possible future projects challenged her, if in no other way, by occupying time that could have been spent otherwise. She told me often that I reminded her of her father, a compliment, or so I was told. On the other hand, although I don’t think I mentioned it to her, a bit of her personality seem to reflect my own habits. Somewhere during the course of our days shared there in the classroom, however, probably as she was reading something in a group session, the book shown here was declared my own personal favorite of any in the library. It’s the story of a fellow whose legs were so spindly and whose neck was so long that when he tried to compete in the annual jungle version of DWTS, his attempts to boogie were ridiculed by all there. Nonetheless, befriended by cricket with a fiddle and swept up into the sound of the breeze blowing through the trees and grass, beneath a full moon he learns that all it takes is “finding music that we love”. I may be seventy years old, but the moral registers with me. What’s more: there’s a copy of the tale now sitting on my computer desk, with a note from my friend on the inside cover. It’s not deep theology, but it works for me......