LETTERS FROM HOME: I THANK YOU GOD FOR MOST THIS AMAZING BEING HUMAN

Aug. 14, 1997

Dear Leslie,

You don't have to live in New York or Paris or San Francisco to know extraordinary people. They are defined not by where they live but by how.

One such human being named Don Ford died here last week. He had played music with my parents for many years and was a friend of DC's parents as well. My mother has a videotape of him drumming at 14 for her singing group on a local TV program called "The Breakfast Show." He was 14 but the musicians in the area already knew who he was.

In recent months, DC saw Donnie often at municipal band concerts. He had played in the band for decades but could no longer because of his illness. He still came out to listen and applaud.

Donnie applauded everyone. It was his nature to compliment and give support, to cheer the rest of us on in whatever our endeavors. I think he simply marveled at the beauty human beings are capable of.

The newspaper morgue contains a number of stories written about him. In recent years he became a role model for people fighting life-threatening diseases. There is also a letter to the editor he wrote in 1987 praising a concert. "The University Choir's performance was the best performance I have ever witnessed by a choir anywhere," he wrote.

Donnie didn't hold back.

DC sat with him at a recent concert. The music was stirring, the night was spectacular, and the light of the rising moon shone on the tears in Donnie's eyes.

We can't know what he was thinking, what the moon, the sounds, the friends might have evoked in him. He had a ferocious tenderness for life.

Though he went on to become a math teacher, businessman and university administrator, Donnie studied literature in college. For his funeral he chose a poem by e.e. cummings, a poet who believed in joy and spontaneity more than syntax.

`I Thank You God for Most This Amazing'

I thank you God for most this amazing

day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(I who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any -- lifted from the no

of all nothing -- human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

The last time I saw Donnie was at a Hallmark store not long before he died. He was frail-looking, but in a forceful voice praised my work to some of the other customers standing about.

I was embarrassed a bit, but Donnie was free from such afflictions.

He was a caring being human.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.