December 22, 2005

EDITORIAL

Peter’s lesson

I love so many things about Yellow Springs.

I love how small we are, and how when I go to take pictures of school kids, I often know the names of their parents, and sometimes the names of their dogs. I love seeing those children grow up, even from a distance, and watching them walk in their graduation robes in the high school gym. And I feel gratified seeing the older people in town growing older, and knowing that I’m getting older as well, that we are all getting older together. In a small town time seems to have a human face, the faces of all those people around me, and life feels richer somehow.

I love our creativity. It’s amazing to me that the folks at Shirley/Jones Gallery thought up the idea of having everyone contribute to a community painting on heavenly blue. And people did it! There were hundreds of swatches, swatches of pure color, aqua and navy and turqouise, swatches with sequins and sparkly stuff, swatches of blue fabric, swatches with pictures of children. And it did seem heavenly, all those people creating something lovely together.

I love how empowered we feel. Hundreds of miles away this fall a hurricane devastated countless lives, and Yellow Springers sprang into action. People in KORR raised thousands of dollars and before you knew it, sent truckloads of supplies to the Gulf Coast. One woman helped to rescue pets over the Internet, and school children pooled their dimes and dollars. Throughout our history villagers have stepped up to the challenges before them, and we’re still doing it.

And most of all, I love our kindness. Just look at the page opposite this one, and read the letter of the man whose family suffered from a fire, and then felt embraced by the community. Or the story, elsewhere in the paper, of the many, many people who rallied around Peter Jensen’s family during his illness, and the remarkable love that helped to sustain him.

Of course, we’re not perfect. We need to do better in many ways, to make our community more diverse, more affordable, and even more kind.

But this week I’m feeling grateful for the good things. Partly I’m feeling grateful because it’s the holidays and partly because I’m still under the spell of Peter Jensen and the story I heard about his courage and grace during the six years he lived with Lou Gehrig’s disease. If he had one thing to teach us, it seemed to be this: that we can see what we have or what we don’t have, and it’s much better to see what we have and to love it. That it’s much better to love what’s good about our sweet but imperfect town and what’s good about the sweet but flawed human beings around us and, of course, what’s good about ourselves as well.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I need to learn this lesson over and over again. In this holiday season, I hope to keep learning.

—Diane Chiddister