Today I’m grateful for the opportunity to sign all of these books for the school family that my intern from 2014 is joining.
That’s right, dear reader; she earned her degree in school counseling a decade ago, when my first book came out, and she has persisted for ten years through one rejection after another, continuing to touch lives as a classroom teacher with passion and verve until the right counseling position opened up for her.
P is for Perseverance, one of the chapters in What’s Under Your Cape?, so as a gift, to celebrate my intern and friend, I signed a copy for each one of her new faculty and staff.
To add an element of engagement and fun, I signed them in groups of five with matching inscriptions, so that she can give them out in a faculty meeting and challenge them to form a five-some by finding the people with the same inscription OR she can randomly put them in the staff boxes with the challenge to find their group among their peers (without using email) for a mini-poster prize.
I even found one first-printing copy in my stash and told her that I’d do an author visit for the staff member who figures out that they have that book. It gave me so much joy to meet her at Starbucks yesterday and show her how proud I am of her! Talk about stick-to-it-tiveness! Michael Jordan once said that he missed 100% of the shots that he didn’t take; Krystle took a lot of shots and missed, but chatting with her yesterday was like oxygen because she knows that this school was worth all of the blocked shots along the way as well as the wait to find her family.
Congrats, Krystle; I’m so very proud of you.
I’m also thinking about a shot as in a photograph today as I think back through the years to all of the times that I’ve played paparazzi. I’ve been intrigued by cameras and photography since I got my first camera back in the 6th grade from collecting Bazooka bubble gum comics. No joke. Before I got my Bazooka treasure, my mom used one of those boxy cameras to capture precious moments like this one from winter of 1971, with this calf named Betsy.
Some fifty-plus years later, I still love these little babies.
As a young teacher, I used a film camera to take pictures of my students; when my mom came to visit in 1989, she took the camera and snapped this shot of my classroom and me.
During my days as a school counselor, I carried a digital camera and then ultimately my iPhone, to capture Character Cam moments.
I’m so grateful for every single shot I took and had taken, because I’m so aware that you never know when it’ll be your last chance at that particular shot. Here’s a cherished moment from our siblings reunion weekend, just weeks before Mipps died. Am I ever glad we took that shot!
When I was a teenager, we got this cool shot, on the family farm in front of a silo that’s no longer there. It was the summer of 1978 and I’d been away in Chicago serving as a nanny, so my little brothers were happy to have their sister back home. You know what’s kind of weird, though? Mipps is wearing the number 53, which is exactly how many years we’d have him in our family before God called him home. Again, I’m so grateful for this photo memory.
In fact, rarely have I ever said, “Gosh, why did I take that shot?”
So today I challenge you to stay in the moment and be where your feet are, even as you freeze frame that moment in time, which so quickly becomes the shot that helps you keep those memories alive even after that season has come and gone.
And if ever it feels like you’ll never get your shot, be like Krystle and keep on shooting!
Barbara Gruener 