What a Beautiful Day to NOT be Sick!

I believe I have finally emerged from the slums!

It turns out that my week of lethargy & non-motivation 

was just gearing me up for sickness that entertained me all weekend.

I attribute Ramon's generosity to sharing this gift with me.

But I am finally breathing through both nostrils again,

and only have remnants of my whooping cough (or so it sounds).

On Sunday, I was able to worship the Lord in a new way.

Our dear friends, the Richardson's, have a mentally handicapped daughter who stays at a special home.

She brought her friends to church this week, and they sat in the pew behind us.

We soon discovered they had a love of music and sang loudly for all to hear.

They didn't know the words.

They didn't know the melody,

but their singing was so beautiful to me.

I just cried throughout the whole worship time.

And then on the pew beside us was a young Down Syndrome boy.

I often see him in church with his parents and brother

and am always drawn to him because as soon as he walks into the sanctuary,

if music is playing, he has his hands up in worship.

This Sunday was no different.

He kept his sturdy little arms raised the entire time his father held him.

Only once did he lower them to grab the top of his brother's head

and give it a kiss.

Well, that just started the water works all over again.

What a sweet time to be reminded of how the Lord views us all equally.

In fact, I think the voices of those children are sweeter to the Lord than my trained voice ever is.

I came across this short story/memoir in my Reader's Digest this morning and wanted to share it.

It's quite delightful.

Excerpt: Quite Enough Of Calvin Trillin

BIOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING
"I've found that a lot of people say they're from Kansas City when they aren't. Just for the prestige."
Chubby
It's common these days for memoirs of childhood to concentrate on some dark secret within the author's ostensibly happy family. It's not just common; it's pretty much mandatory. Memoir in America is an atrocity arms race. A memoir that reveals incest is trumped by one that reveals bestiality, and that, in turn, is driven from the bestseller list by one that reveals incestuous bestiality.
When I went into the memoir game, I knew I was working at a horrific disadvantage: As much as I would hate this getting around in literary circles in New York, the fact is that I had a happy childhood. At times, I've imagined how embarrassing this background would be if I found myself discussing childhoods with other memoirists late at night at some memoirist hangout.
After talking about their own upbringings for a while-the glue- sniffing and sporadically violent grandmother, for instance, or the family tapeworm-they look toward me. Their looks are not totally respectful. They are aware that I've admitted in print that I never heard my parents raise their voices to each other. They have reason to suspect, from bits of information I've let drop from time to time, that I was happy in high school. I try desperately to think of a dark secret in my upbringing. All I can think of is Chubby, the collie dog.
"Well, there's Chubby, the collie dog," I say, tentatively.
"Chubby, the collie dog?" they repeat.
There really was a collie named Chubby. I wouldn't claim that the secret about him qualifies as certifiably traumatic, but maybe it explains an otherwise mysterious loyalty I had as a boy to the collie stories of Albert Payson Terhune. We owned Chubby when I was two or three years old. He was sickly. One day Chubby disappeared. My parents told my sister, Sukey, and me that he had been given to some friends who lived on a farm, so that he could thrive in the healthy country air. Many years later-as I remember, I was home on vacation from college-Chubby's name came up while my parents and Sukey and I were having dinner. I asked why we'd never gone to visit him on the farm. Sukey looked at me as if I had suddenly announced that I was thinking about eating the mashed potatoes with my hands for a while, just for a change of pace.
"There wasn't any farm," she said. "That was just what they told us. Chubby had to be put to sleep."
"Put to sleep!" I said. "Chubby's gone?"
Somebody-my mother, I think-pointed out that Chubby would have been gone in any case, since collies didn't ordinarily live to the age of eighteen.
"Isn't it sort of late for me to be finding this out?" I said.
"It's not our fault if you're slow on the uptake," my father said.
I never found myself in a memoirist gathering that required me to tell the story of Chubby, but, as it happened, I did relate the story in a book. A week or so later, I got a phone call from Sukey.
"The collie was not called Chubby," she said. "The collie was called George. You were called Chubby."