Tonight's Thoughts

I really enjoyed tonight's high school music program, but I felt a little sad at the thought of all those wonderfully familiar faces that will not be there next year when I expect to return to teaching. Not only will everyone in the large senior class be missing, all the freshmen and sophomores will be students I have not taught before.

The songs in tonight's program included a section of Taize' songs. Wikipedia says:

The Taizé Community is an ecumenical, monastic community in southern France. It is comprised of a little over 100 brothers who come from both Catholic and Protestant traditions. Over 100,000 young people from around the world make pilgrimages to Taizé each year for prayer, Bible study, and shared communal work.

The audience helped sing these songs, which are written in a simple, prayerful, and meditative style. One of them was a four-part round. Song sheets had been distributed before the service.

On "Dide ta Deo" all the former students in the audience who had helped sing this song in past school programs joined the current students at the front to help sing. It was glorious. Wendell started a good thing when he taught the students that song about six years ago.

I liked seeing familiar names among the song writers: Lyle Stutzman (the director), and Kenneth Shenk, Tryphena Schrock, and Jared Shetler, who are Music II students.

Andrea and her Spanish class students sang three lovely songs, with two of them ("Soplo del Cielo," and "Oh, Santisimo, Felicisimo!") sounding familiar. The last one is one of the most lilting and joyful Christmas tunes I know.

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Tomorrow evening the nutrition class will carry off the banquet they have been planning for their parents, fellow students, and staff members. It sounds like they're having fun getting ready, along with the usual planning pains.

When I helped plan the last banquet, I asked the students in the class to write down which was their first choice for a planning committee on which to serve--food, decorations, entertainment. This turned out well, with three fairly evenly divided groups. This year, Norma did the same thing, but the groups turned out very lopsided till she tweaked them appropriately.

A favorite memory I have from the last banquet is how much Mahlon (one of our elderly guests) enjoyed it. His mind had begun to fail by then, and he spoke very little, and seemed only partly aware of what went on around him. But that night he laughed and laughed when Andrew (Mr. S.) and a group of students conducted chemistry experiments for the audience's benefit. They had many misfortunes and made many mistakes in the process, and the whole session ended with a loud bang in the kitchen where they had gone to finish the experiment.

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During the announcements at the end of the service, David Y. gave a report on Conrad Yoder's surgery to remove a tumor that had grown inside his skull. It was discovered when it began to press on his optic nerve and affect his vision. The surgery was done arthroscopically in Texas on Monday. After the surgery, his family learned that the surgeon feared that Conrad's vision might have been destroyed during the surgery because the tumor had penetrated the lining of the optic nerve. It could not be removed without invading the nerve area. As soon as he heard that Conrad was awake after the anesthesia wore off, he hurried to his bed and asked, "Can you see?"

He did apologize though for the fact that Conrad would have no sense of smell since he had to sever the olfactory nerve. As David put it, Conrad's brain seems to have ignored what the surgeon had done, because he can smell coffee brewing for the first time in a long while, and he even detected the roasting coffee smell on David's clothes after he had visited a coffee processing plant and then returned to the hospital, although he mistook it for the smell of burning brush. At least he asked David if that's what he had been doing.

Some concern remains since the tumor had grown into the bone and calcified to the point that it could not all be removed. Because of this there's a possibility that it would grow back eventually. However, it was not malignant, to my knowledge, and it was slow-growing--both
in his favor.

People have been praying, and tonight we could all rejoice that things seem to be going well.

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Grant, yesterday (to Steven): Steven, you'd just as well admit it. You're a redneck.

Steven: Well, that's good, in some ways.

Grant is also a self-professed redneck. ("You know, I just figured something out. I'm a redneck.") I don't know for sure what he means by that. From what I can observe, I think it means:

1. You like guns and hunting.

2. You say ain't.

3. You drive a truck.

4. You listen to country music and play it on a guitar.

5. You wear either a cowboy hat or bill cap.

6. You wear boots.

7. You don't read for pleasure or go to concerts or plays.

8. You have a motorcycle.

9. You wear your hair long or short or shave it all off.

10. You love to lampoon PETA.

How did I raise a redneck? Is pleading innocent allowed?

I'm pinning my hopes on year number 25, which I'm told is when people's brains mature fully.