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8/25/04

Hi Friends,

Well, they did it to me again. They’re sneaky, you know? The way they get to you... You tell yourself, not this year; this year I won’t let those little smiles into my heart. But you’re fooling yourself. No power on earth can resist a child’s happy smile.

Of course I’m talking about my annual show at Camp Dreamcatcher , the week-long summer camp for kids whose lives have been assaulted by AIDS/HIV. I’ve been playing at camp for about a half dozen years now, and I never fail to leave happier than when I came.

It’s like my friend Sheryl says... Sheryl is a massage therapist who donates ( devotes would be a better word) an entire week to working with (and on) these amazing kids... "No matter how much of yourself you give to them, you always get more back". Sheryl says it has to do with the mysterious chemistry of the human brain and its release of something called serotonin. I think she’s just too modest to call it kindness.

That’s really what it is; the secret to the whole place. Kindness. It’s all over Dreamcatcher. It’s in the counselors (mostly teenagers and young adults) who have come from all over the country to give their time, it’s there in the children themselves, who respond to the sunlight and laughter of this beautiful place by beaming it back at you with a hundred times the candle power and joy. It’s certainly there in the face of my extraordinary friend Patty Hillkirk who founded the camp and sets the tone for the week with her quiet boundless compassion.

Me? All I have to do is sing some songs and I get to soak in all those wonderful little (and not so little) faces in the bleachers. You know, we do the show outdoors and in all these years it’s never rained... Strange? Not really. The kindness of CDC is contagious and summer storm clouds are no more immune to it than you or me... They plan to rain, they really do. They come in like me, all stressed; hurried and harried with buckets of late summer humidity all ready for dumping on something... on ANYTHING, but then something happens to those clouds. Always does. They get right up there in the sky over camp and they change their minds. Their  collective mood somehow brightens, and with it, the very skies.

Watch out world!  Camp lets out Saturday and all that kindness will come streaming out of Chester County, Pennsylvania. It’ll be humming silly campfire songs and wearing backpacks.  It'll be riding busses and vans and it'll have more hope than it did a week ago. That kindness will spread out in a thousand different directions and touch everything and everyone in its path. You may not even know it got to you when you first encounter it. You'll simply find yourself whistling a little tune as the smile wends its way to the corners of your mouth . It'll come directly from the grin on the face of a passerby who caught it from someone who saw a little kid grinning from the window of a passing minivan. They're the smiles that really get to you. That’s cause they're so sneaky...

Peace,

John

P.S., Rotten Dan's been busy again and among his latest tweaks is a new button on this site's shiny new menu bar called "forums". This new link will apparently allow folks who follow this page to communicate with each other,  and me, by posting messages on a sort of bulletin board.  It should be an interesting experiment. Be sure to give it a try!