Freely Giving and Receiving

Looking back on our visit to the Waldorf School for their flowerchildren's holiday festival, Ian had a story I didn't know about until after the fact. It turned out that Ian had his own little adventure while I was off helping a wonderfully daffy, long-haired, bespectacled late-middle-aged Quaker lady, dressed in the garb of Haight Ashbury circa 1968, including a colorful bohemian dress and a probably-home-made necklace. This lady had sold us crafts - she had two prices - the regular one and the slight discount, but only for children spending their own money. As I said, she was daffy but nice - or more correctly, daffy and nice. In any case, at the end of the festival, Amy volunteered my services to her Rainbow Sister; she needed help taking apart her several centuries-old folding (but nearly-impossible-to-actually-fold) card tables, and loading stuffed dolls and hearts and figurines and miniature wicker furniture into sturdy reusable shopping backs and carrying them out to her trusty Northern New England Hippy four-wheel-drive Subaru. So as I helped her, and Amy wafted in and out of the action, Ian went off and had his own serendipity...

He went into the *other* crafts room - the main auditorium - and apparently watched an artisan put away all his Christmas ornaments, and eventually Ian told the man that his Christmas ornaments were beautiful. So the gentleman took an icicle ornament, wrapped it in paper, handed it to Ian, and said, "Merry Christmas."

Ian was so moved, that he ran off to where he kept his own stash of yield from the day, and ran back to the auditorium with the shiny stone that he had received in his visit to the Enchanted Forest - one of the attractions of the Festival, a classroom re-made into a mysterious woodland where children acquire shiny, colorful, glossy stones. He took the stone, handed it to the same artisan, and reciprocated: "Merry Christmas."

But there is a twist in the story; looking back on the adventure, Ian wasn't entirely sure whether he had given the shiny stone to the right vendor:

"I'm just a little worried. I may have given it to the wrong person. I hope I gave it to the right person."

But after all, at Christmas time, who can stop to get caught up in these prickly little distinctions...

(December 4, 2011)