yesterday was School Supplies Distribution day at the Simple Way and my beautiful wife Valerie [tbV] had spent months organising donations of school supplies and planning out volunteers and mapping and entertainment and announcements and food and so many other things [as the LOUDest lightning crashes its way down outside my window as if to emphasise the point i am about to make and by lightning, clearly i mean thunder] and the only thing she couldn’t really do much about except pray and hope and watch weather reports was the rain, which was mostly supposed to stay away, and mostly didn’t…
and so it was all stations go as a whole bunch of incredible volunteers and neighbors braved the conditions and did a really great job in making the best out of a rain-drenched day – from the bag distribution to the dental van, from Josh the juggler to Ran’D Shine [yeah, no kidding] the magician, from the bouncy castle to the MC to the people creating lines and carrying bags and covering everything with rain-repelling tents and blankets and upside down plastic swimming pools and anything else we could find out hands on…
and in the midst of it all i discovered this:
if you look closely you will note the umbrella ends after the handle… that’s right, somewhere on the ground i found the bottom piece of an umbrella and so i decided to do my small bit in terms of raising the spirits by channeling my best Charlie Chaplin and so i walked through the rain holding the handle as if it was attached to an umbrella and told kids they had to stand really close to me if they wanted to avoid the rain [yes, one of two stares told me i had to be doubly aware of the stranger danger aspect of how it might seem to young people who didn’t know me] and most of them laughed or came close and pretended not to get wet.
to the adults who were secretly rolling their eyes or letting out a brief LOL at the sight of the silliness i would tell them, “it is very easy to pack away – i get home and it’s just straight in a drawer and sorted, although it does lose a little in terms of actual rain protection” and they seemed to like that…
simple, silly, laugh-enducing, fun – it brought a few smiles and hopefully made some of the people forget a little bit about the semi-deluge we had going on around us…
and 450 kids or more got bags of free school supplies, and more will be going out on Thursday and sp you can’t go wrong with that!
the simple weigh 