| So Mommy learned two things.
A child wants to learn all about music and poetry, and he or she
wants to learn it like Mommy taught it on the program, with the
help of a parent. The children liked the closeness between the mother
and child, and they liked the familiar songs as well as the ones
they heard for the first time, all woven together like the different
colors in the tabernacle-strands of blue and red and purple, winding
in and out, and lots and lots of beautiful music and sounds and
poetry and love.
Every time you help a child to see God, you do good, Mommy
says. The little girl next door, Ann, recently visited Mommy. She
was a very, very good and sweet little girl. She thought a lot,
mostly to herself, but she told Mommy some of her thoughts.
Ann was the last little girl I ever talked to. When I came
back from the hospital the first time, she came to see me. We sat
on the front porch, and she said, "It's so very, very nice
to have Linda home again." She was only three years old.
Then, when I went to the hospital again and never came home
except for the funeral, she wondered where I had gone, and Mommy
told her with the angels. Ann said, "Can you see her?"
Mommy said, "No, not yet."
She comes to see Mommy, to tell her about little Pear, the
little Chinese boy and the robin who sings, and the butterfly sitting
on the leaf of the tree. For a few weeks this spring, Mommy saw
a robin that didn't chirp, but sang a tune, two notes repeated all
the time. So strange!
Ann rolled her big gray-green eyes and her pointed little chin
rose up high as she looked at the highest limb of the huge oak tree.
"There's a butterfly sitting on a leaf!" Mommy looked
and looked, and finally she saw the butterfly. It was the color
of Ann's eyes, with yellow along the sides. A beautiful creature!
But hard to see!
In the evening, Ann brought her book, Little Pear, about
the Chinese boy. She said it was a "magic" book, for at
night all kinds of colors appear in it to Ann-blue, green, "mostly
red," yellow, purple, and orange too. The colors are all part
of the "magic" says Ann, for she alone can see them in
the dark night when they glow for her.
The mystery of the robin was cleared up when little Ann explained
she teaches "I pledge allegiance to the flag" to any bird
who will listen. This bird must have listened, because he sang the
first two notes of the song Ann sings with all the school children.
It sounded like "Get up! Get out!" to Mommy. It made
her very restless because she was trying to finish the book quickly,
and she never rested anymore. A friend who came to see her said,
"I think I'd shoot that bird. Aren't you getting pretty tired
by now of getting up and getting out?"
Mommy took a trip to New York when it was the time of Pentecost,
May 22, and she took along the pages she had written on the book.
She went to see some people about the radio program, "Songs
of the Centuries," that we worked out together, but, while
she was in New York, another funny coincidence happened!
She got off a bus and went to a drugstore to have a soda at
Schraft's. Before that, she had copied a list of twenty-five names
from a book about editors and publishers for writers. She copied
it very quickly from a list of a hundred or more because the place
was closing, and it was almost 5:30.
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