I like the deep tone of buffalo drums...

AWW ~ march 7, 2012
non-subject: a place

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May, 2005.

On a weekday morning, I enter the First Baptist Church in the town of King. Just like any other week, I am here to sing and dance with little people, children ages 2 to 5. Once a week I haul my twelve hand drums in a big dark blue nylon bag with beige webbed handles and a beige webbed shoulder strap. A cover-flap flips over the top and attaches with Velcro to the side of the bag. I have a love/hate relationships with Velcro. I'm thankful it was invented, but I much prefer zippers or latches or snaps or buttons or tie laces.

The big blue bag is left over from the late 1980s when I sold Tupperware. I use to haul the big blue bag filled with plastic Tupperware to home parties. For a period of months during my almost-two-year Tupperware career, I ranked among the top ten Tupperware sales persons in the southeast United States.

Now, in 2005, the big blue bag carries synthetic-headed, wooden, hand drums: six pancake drums, three bongo drums, and three buffalo drums. Buffalo drums are my favorite; they have a deep sound. The bongos have a muted sound. The pancake drums have more of a tinny sound. I love teaching the children about rhythm and pitch.

"Melody is rhythm and pitch, you hear it in a song like this. Melody is rhythm and pitch; you hear it in a song like this. Do-do-do-doomp (slap, slap) Do-do-do-doomp (slap, slap). Do-do-do-doomp, do-do-do-doomp, do-do-do-dooomp (slap, slap)"

The daycare teachers often chuckle the first time we sing that song. They know it is the tune for "The Adam's Family." Usually when I make up a children's song, I have to pick a tune I know; or else I forget the song

Along with my big blue bag, I carry other tote bags. One with rhythm sticks. Another carries an array of percussion instruments. One more bag is loaded with stuffed animals or puppets or some sort of visual aids and probably a book or two from which read or sing the story, a story in sync with the theme we are singing about. I like themes, but not rigidily so. If the kids are excited about a song not related to our theme, we sing it. But I can usually find a way to tie whatever song we sing in with our theme.

On this particular day in May, 2005, I enter the office at the church and pick up my folder in which parents leave me payments and notes. I carry it with me to the magical music room where I set up to welcome the first class of the morning.

In the few previous months, I'd been investigating how to leave The Way. Where would I go if and when I left?

Mainstream denominations and churches were distasteful to me. I could never believe that Jesus is God or that the dead are alive; so how could I go to a mainstream church? The Way Ministry had taught me the truth; and I still believed that truth. But The Way had become so fossilized. I felt so dead inside. I wanted genuine fellowship again; I wanted that sweet, caramel, chewy center of God's heart.

But I didn't know where to turn, or who to trust, or how to move beyond the spiritual dearth and hollowness that haunted me every day, the hole in my heart and gut.

That day, in May, 2005, an envelope awaited me in the music folder. But the envelope wasn't from any of my students' parents. It was from my past friend, Linda, whom I had marked and avoided as was standard practice for Way believers when someone left the Way Household, which I had believed was the true household of God.

Linda lived in Ohio at the time. She and her husband and their family had left The Way sometime around 2000, I think. Linda had written me at the time and let me know about their decision to leave. I had never responded.

After music classes that morning, I open the envelope from Ohio and read Linda's letter. We connected by phone within a couple months.

I never imagined that within a few years of that phone call, Linda's two daughters and I would be working together in North Carolina side by side, packing miniature art to ship around the country, and even across the oceans.

None of us stayed with The Way.

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Related Post: To Hear with Different Ears

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