Monday, May 08, 2006

Now taking requests.

Last school year I became acquainted with Frankenstein.

The first was the student play at the high school I work for.
The second, was my guitar.

I work in special education, having the wonderful job of caring for and teaching a young man with Cerebral Palsy.
Music plays a pivotal role in his life and we will often travel to various shops and businesses to play songs for the staff there.
One day when visiting the post office,
playing music on what is probably the worst ukulele in the world,
the postal clerk asked us if we wanted a guitar.

Um, no thanks,
can't you see that we already have this wonderful precision instrument
that reminds us of the Hawaiian islands...

Of course I accepted and for about a year made wonderful music on our free gift.

Just prior to Christmas this year the unexpected (unexpected but wholly avoidable) happened,
I took the guitar from low humidity and extreme cold, into a very high humidity,
high temerature environment...
THe neck snapped at the end of the fretboard.
Working away in the school's shop
we drilled holes,
cut wooden pins,
and reassembled the severed head to the neck
after stringing and tuning ,
the gift guitar sounds better than it did before
I Think it's a bit of miracle.

Kind of like this life
Old schoolhouse reborn into art studio
life rising out of the ashes piles of divorce
and second chances just maybe
being better chances than the first.

It's hard to get my mind around that
how God makes good from all sorts of bad happenings
and our ability to take what He has given and smash it up a bit.
I don't know what kind of tunes I'll be playing
on this Frankenstien life,
But I know the things my God puts back together
are not monsters.

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