I’ve been struck lately by the re-discovery that everything one does in life comes back around at some point to contribute.  I’d hoped that my “toolbox” of skills would be useful here.  Some of you heard me say that I wanted an opportunity to put those to work in a really organic way, one that didn’t require me to re-design them to make them more commercial or temper them in some way so as not to step on toes.  Basically I wanted to put them into play in a manner which didn’t involve income generation.  So here I am and and I will say that everything comes around.

The point is, the next time you think you’ve been doing something that doesn’t matter, a job that’s not taking you anywhere or where you might be bored or spinning your wheels, you’re probably learning something or experiencing something that will be useful later.  I call it a body-of work, but as someone who’s name I can’t recall said, “It all matters.”

Thus far, I’ve helped re-write three resumes, am consulting to help a Ugandan finish book – starting with editing, have taught a woman to knit and make dolls to sell, am re-organizing an office and creating a filing system,  consulting on a literacy program, re-vamping a website, have fixed a toilet, taught a healing class, written a proposal for starting reading programs and will soon embark on organizing a book collection in a local library and a project to set up libraries in schools.  I’ve used skills I didn’t know I had, like a tiny widget  that fell into the bottom of the box and you find it when nothing else will work.    Sometimes one has to dig deep and use skills in new ways, but they all matter.

The most surprising thing is that as I find myself working in a literacy program, the “skills” I’m relying on are not those I consciously developed.  These are things I learned from my mother, a life long advocate of early childhood reading and a career librarian.  Mom went back to get her graduate degree when I was about still young.  She actually saved money from baking pies to save her tuition for LSU.  I didn’t know this at the time it was happening – I just knew there were a lot of pies being baked! And I couldn’t understand why she sat in the middle of the floor and sobbed one day when our cat (who mysteriously disappeared the next day) managed to jump down from a perch and land with each foot in a different pie. Note: it was the last cat we ever had.  Anyway – from that point on we were hauled around the LSU campus trying to keep up.  We did our homework in the library and shelved books in the main library where she worked as a Reference Librarian to keep out of mischief.  My first job at University of Texas was writing the Dewey Decimal Numbers on the spine of the book, but they didn’t like my printing so that was the end of that.

Years passed and she became the Children’s Librarian, starting and managing story hour and passing on her love of reading.  Evie and I practically raised our kids reading to them from discarded library books sent our way by the box load.  I’ve always known this background shaped my children’s lives and informed my adulthood, but I’d not thought I would be so directly using every shred of it in Africa.  I can just about hear my mother’s voice and feel her excitement over the chance to get into a library and organize a collection.

So – Mom, this one’s for you.  Are there cat’s in heaven?

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