Singing to the Wrong Tune

Ms. Rachel's got a gift. She just keeps pointing it at the ceiling.

I still take my coffee the way I did when Truman was in office, and I see no reason to change that. A person who knows what she wants before breakfast is a person who gets things done. I mention this because Ms. Rachel, bless her industry, has apparently decided she no longer knows what she is.

She built something real, I will give her that. You don't get that many toddlers sitting still without genuine talent, and I have tried. But somewhere between the songs and the subscriber count, she got it in her head that a platform for teaching children to share their crackers was also a platform for everything else rattling around in her chest. That is like using your good cast iron to melt candles. The pan works fine. That is not the point.

Kids don't need the world's full weight dropped on them before they can tie their own shoes. They need to know it's raining and to grab their jacket. They need to know how to fall down and get back up without making a production of it. They need to practice being kind to the person sitting next to them, because that is the whole job, and most grown adults still haven't figured it out. You teach them that, you've done something. You skip straight to the complicated part, you've just frightened them and called it education.

Now, people got angry with Ms. Rachel. Said she was calling for things that weren't right. She walked into that the way you'd walk into church after stepping in a fresh cow patty, tracking it all the way to the third pew, and then wondering why folks were looking at you sideways. Then she announced she'd keep talking. I understand the impulse. Stubbornness has its uses. But there is a difference between standing firm on something that matters and pointing your motorboat straight into a storm because you already started the engine. You will make it through, maybe. You will also be wet, stuck, and explaining yourself to people who told you so.

The Hendersons' boy, the one the lake gave back, he doesn't carry on about what ought to be different. He just moves through his days, careful and quiet, like a man who has learned the difference between what's his to carry and what isn't. We all learned something that year. You cannot fix what you cannot hold in your two hands. You start with the person in front of you, and you work outward from there, slow and deliberate, the way you'd salt a road before the ice comes, not after you're already in the ditch.

Ms. Rachel is not from around here. That is not a criticism, it is an observation. She has not lived through the year the county fair ran nine days longer than it was supposed to and nobody could leave. She has not learned to account for the third porch step that is not there on Sundays. She has not yet developed the particular patience that comes from living in a place where some things cannot be explained and must simply be managed. That patience is what separates a person who can help from a person who just makes noise while trying to.

She has a gift. I said that already and I mean it. A woman who can hold a two-year-old's attention for twenty minutes is doing something close to miraculous, and I do not use that word loosely in Harrow Corners, where the bar for miraculous has shifted considerably over the years. But a gift aimed wrong is just energy going somewhere it shouldn't. She needs to point it back at what she's actually good at, which is showing small people how to be decent to one another. The world will give them plenty of hard lessons without her help. Her job is to make sure they are sturdy enough to take them.

That is what children need. Not controversy, not a soapbox, not someone else's argument handed to them before they are old enough to know what to do with it. They need someone to show up, day after day, and show them what a steady life looks like. You want to change the world, Ms. Rachel? Start there. It is slower than a speech and it works considerably better.

Show up and do the work. That is the whole sermon. , Aunt Dot
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