I was planning the next session of our Sprouted Acorn Learning Series, a course on portrait drawing with Fred Del Guidice, when I realized that I had made an error. I had billed this as a five-week course, but I had set aside six dates. So I picked up the phone to call Mr. Del to get his opinion on just how many dates he would recommend for such a class. The phone rang twice.
"Hello?" There was both surprise and recognition in his voice. I figured he'd seen my name on the caller ID.
"Hello," I answered. "How are you today?"
There was a pause. I could hear tension. But, knowing Mr. Del, I knew the response would be positive.
"Blessed..." he said, "and challenged."
That's about as close to complaining as Mr. Del ever gets. I knew something was wrong.
"What's wrong?" Isn't that what you would ask if you knew something was wrong?
"I just can't believe you called," he said.
His disbelief, it turns out, stemmed from the fact that I gave him four chickens. I mean, that's not WHY he was in disbelief. He was in disbelief because they four chickens I had given him five weeks ago had been slaughtered that morning, most likely by a racoon.
"Everyone's so upset," he said. "The girls are crying. The boys are crying. Even my wife cried."
I knew right then what I had to do. I still had eleven chickens in a box in the kids' bathroom. Eleven chickens are too many for us. I told Fred I'd be over. He protested, of course, but I didn't relent. It was a selfish thing, see. It's more blessed to give, and all that.
I loaded all of the kids in the car, which wasn't too hard. They love Mr. Del, and since we just finished our last art class on Wednesday, complete with an appreciation parade given by the students, my kids thought it would be at least a few weeks before they'd see their favorite drawing teacher again.
We arrived at their farmhouse, and I was immediately glad that we made the visit. Mr. Del had purchased a fifty pound bag of chick feed the day before, had built a small coop the week before, and he couldn't find a feed supply with extra chicks. I pulled out the box of five Japanese Bantams (he'd had four, but Sweetheart had insisted that we give him five this time) and popped them into the brand new coop.
And then the fun started. Mr. Del introduced me to his fantastic wife, we visited with his warm, precocious, charming children, and then we got to take a peek inside his studio. Wow. It was a feast for the eyes. What an encouragement to see a man of Faith display such incredible talent and ability in his art. And throughout his studio were reminders of his family; paintings they'd done, drawings of each of them, letters and notes and cards and posters given to this loving dad by his grateful children.
The real treat, I would have to say, was when we discussed singing and I discovered that this family loves to sing together. Two of the young daughters sang Create in Me a Clean Heart, complete with beautiful harmonies. Neither of them read music. It all comes naturally. "It's genetic," one daughter says. And she tells me how her mother used to sit on her grandmother's knee, listening to The Old Time Gospel Hour, her grandmother singing the harmonies and feeding her granddaughter M&Ms.
It was such a pleasure to take that spontaneous field trip to the next county, to see our favorite art teacher, and to be inspired.
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