She listens to music every night as she is falling asleep. We have it tuned to the classical station, and she is pleased with whatever they are playing: chamber music, symphonies, opera.
Sometimes she listens to the radio when she is playing alone in her room, but then the station isn’t so consistent. Several months ago I went in there and found her listening, her back propped against the pillows on her bed, one leg bent and the foot resting on the bed, the other leg crossed against the bent one. She was holding a book in front of her, “reading,” and looking oh so much like a teenager.
The station wasn’t the classical one. The song was a pop song and one I had never heard before.
“What are you listening to?” I asked her.
“Simon,” she said, and I wondered if this was a new band that had escaped my attention. I suddenly had premonitions of life ten years from now, with my fifteen-year-old daughter exposing me to popular culture.
“What’s Simon?” I asked.
“Simon,” she said, in that characteristic way of hers, that one in which comprehension is supposed to develop magically when the Same Exact Thing is repeated over and over again.
“What’s Simon?”
“Simon. They play everything.”
And I’m wondering if she means that the station plays everything including this new band called Simon or… or…. Or what.
But just then I am rescued from my ignorance by an ad on the radio: “W-something-or-other,” they say, “We play everything.”
Oh. So Simon is a radio station, and they play everything. Got it.
Lately we’ve been tuning in with more deliberation to The River, another local radio station, one that also claims, in its own way, to play everything, but it’s more likely to be the things we like. And we’ve done this, foregoing our iPods, because The River is advertising the HopeFest. We tune in, listening carefully to those otherwise ignored talking periods between the songs, waiting to hear them talk about it.
So you can understand, can’t you?, that I was primed several weeks ago when Emma Grace told me what she had heard. She had been tucked in to bed, classical music playing, closet light on, bedroom door closed. “Good-night, Gracie,” and that’s it for the day.
But no. Suddenly she was calling to me from the doorway of her room.
“Mommy! Mommy! They’re talking about the HopeFest!”
“They are?” and I’m not irritated that she’s out of bed when she should be Fast Asleep.
“Yes, Mommy! They’re talking about the HopeFest! I heard it!”
I’m delighted! Thrilled! This is just what we want! After all the work Bill has put into it, and after all the effort he has spent on advertising, word is finally getting out. And she isn’t even listening to The River. She’s listening to the classical station.
The classical station. Hmmmm.
“What did they say?” I ask, somehow still believing. It’s going to be a great music festival, after all. It’s possible that the classical station got wind of this event and decided to discuss it All On Their Own. It’s possible.
“They said Aimee Mann!” Emma Grace says. And Aimee Mann is coming, so maybe it’s true!
This is great!
“They said Indigo Girls!”
Really? Suddenly it all sounds a bit dubious.
“Emma Grace, what station are you listening to? Are you listening to Simon?”
“No, I’m listening to my music,” which is what she calls the classical station, “and they said Bill Stevenson, and Rebecca Stevenson, and William and Everett and Emma Grace!”
She stopped short of the cat. How can this be? The classical music station, WCPE, talks about the HopeFest and doesn’t mention our cat?
I go up the stairs and look into the eyes of this elated and highly imaginative little girl. She is Very Pleased, and Very Excited, and I wonder how old she will be before she realizes what a really wonderful thing this HopeFest is. I mean, at some point it might mean something to her that she got to meet Aimee Mann and the Indigo Girls. But at some point, with grace, I hope it will mean more to her that the HopeFest made a big difference in the lives of some precious women in a slum in Nairobi. And I hope, too, that she will know that the extra work her daddy did to make the HopeFest possible is only because of a gracious God, the one who helps us to see outside of ourselves and how it is we might help others.
But there is no explaining that now. It is far too late, and this episode, really, is all about the radio. I tuck her back into her bed, registering, as I close the bedroom door, that WCPE is in the middle of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony.
It’s a long symphony, and they Don’t interrupt it for advertisements.
For a great preview of the HopeFest, please check this out.
