I had a wonderful weekend at a retreat with my Sweet Adelines chorus. We met together at a local hotel on Friday afternoon for fun, rest, lots of conversation, lots of singing, and a potluck dinner before meeting with a wonderful lady from Michigan who directed a chorus for many years, sang in a prize-winning quartet, and does lots of teaching around the States.
Before I left to go to the hotel, in the mail I received a couple of CD's with photos from Haiti. One of my friends, who was also one of the missionary kids I taught while I was there, went with her dad for two weeks to help in the clinics that were being held in Haiti. She stopped by one day to visit and I looked at some of the photos, and I asked her if she would send me a copy of them.
After I came home this afternoon, I loaded some of them on my computer. I could not help smiling when I saw this particular picture. It reminded me of the children's book, Caps for Sale.
A cap salesman is walking along trying to sell his caps and if my memory serves me correctly, he takes a nap under a tree. Some monkeys come along and take his caps and climb a tree with them. When the man awakes, he looks for his caps everywhere and then looks up and sees his hats.
He stamps his foot and says, "You monkeys you, you give me back my caps." They mimic everything he does. Finally, exasperated, he takes his cap off, throws it to the ground, and, in unison, the monkeys take off the caps and throw them down from the tree. The man has his caps back. I guess that's a case of monkey see, monkey do.
A year after Don and I were married we took a trip to Haiti. I wanted him to see where I had worked and meet my friends there. We were walking down a street in Port-au-Prince, and he was looking for a hat to buy. The hats he tried on were all too small. (He had a rather large head.) All a sudden, a hat seller came running up to him.
"Pastor, Pastor, try this one." (Don wasn't a pastor, but we must have been with a missionary that the man recognized. I don't know.) Don tried on the hat, and, lo and behold, it fit. The missionary with us said later that he must have had that hat for a long time, just waiting for someone with a head Don's size to come along. That hat served him well for a good, long time here in the hot sun in Florida.
