good news

and about time.

A phone call this morning from our long-service, volunteer, VERY well qualified Organist of the Early Service...the embodiment of Eeyore in his outlook on the world. Gloomy to a marked degree; in part because of increasingly frail health, lots of pain and weariness.

Despite these impediments to joy, he is a very good musician, an excellent chooser of hymns (the selection at the early service is left entirely up to him)...and he does those little things that nobody else notices, like providing gentle "noodling" on the organ to cover the post-communion ablutions, and so forth.

On Tuesday, while I was "retreating," he had the first of two cataract surgeries. On Wednesday morning early, the bandage came off. And this morning he called, on the verge of tears with sheer delight, to tell me that he had read the whole eye chart, down to the twentieth line, that the notes on his music on the organ-rack were "sharp and black", that the sign over the restaurant where he and his family had a post-bandage breakfast celebration was almost too bright, and that..."there's just...SO...MUCH...LIGHT..." TBTG.