There are weeks that are just too hard to process. They come with so much emotional baggage that you just have to put it all down, lie on the floor, and try to pull yourself together.
This was such a week.
As I sat down to write I couldn’t find any clear line, any story that was waiting to be written, any thought I wanted to share. I had been looking through some photos for a project I am involved in and I thought, “Just choose a photo and write about that. A random photo.” So I did. The results are below, the photo is above.
In the photo, my husband Chuck is off to the left and the shorter lady to his right is Danielle. She is laughing. She is always laughing.
I told her the other day, that sometimes I call her instead of email or text her because I want to hear her laugh, and I know she will, no matter how hard her day is or how many things have gone wrong, Danielle will laugh.
You see, I work with Danielle. The picture was taken at an event , a fair, she put together for families in her fifteen Head Start centers here in western Maine. They are families she knows well having been a teacher and administrator at some of the centers and having her two children go through Head Start when they were little.
If anyone asked me the secret to happiness, perhaps someone from Harvard or Stanford where they are always studying things like that (I’m not sure why except perhaps they wonder themselves) I would simply say, “ Ask Danielle.” I really would.
I’m not sure what she would say, I don’t think she knows herself why she is happy, but I know she would laugh somewhere in the conversation and that poor interviewer/researcher/academic/intellectual would have a brief moment of happiness themselves, might even pick up on the fact that joy is not something to be sought and studied and safeguarded, it is to be shared, -- that’s how it grows and stays and deepens.
Somehow Danielle knows that, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to be in her orbit with our work for kids here in Maine.
And that’s all I want to say about Danielle and the picture and my husband Chuck except for this one thing.
A woman came by our table at the fair and saw a poster Chuck had designed for one of our active play programs a few years ago, called Sizzle and Pop.We give the poster out to all our Head Start families (400 of them) and she had gotten one. She just lit up when she saw it and said, ”My Justin loves that poster! He cut it up and put all those exercises you come up with in his box.”
We both looked confused about the box she was referring to, so she nodded and said,
”It’s his box for when he don’t know what else to do. When he’s real upset. He goes to that box and takes out one of your exercises and does it. It makes him feel better and, if it don’t, he takes another one and does that. That usually does it. So, thanks.”
She moved on to the fuel credit table across from our table where she could sign up for cheaper fuel next winter and we just sat there.
Sometimes there are no words.
