IMPROVISATION
Life is like a piece of jazz music written from the nimble hands and an understanding heart of a loving composer.
Thelonius was the composer’s improvisation of joy.
On the night of his tenth birthday, he dreamed a dream.
He dreamed he was laying on a woven mat made of millet stalks.
He was looking up into a moonless, starlit night.
He was listening to the sounds of other children playing in the fields around him.
Suddenly, clouds gathered and began to swirl around him.
The clouds swirled and swirled until they formed a swirling cloud that came to earth and touched down on the ground beside him.
He lay there without moving or making a sound.
He observed the swirling cloud. “Why has it come? he wondered.
The children ran to the cloud and gathered around it.
“Don’t touch it!” they yelled.
“Aach! It’s going to land on Thelonius!”
Land on Thelonius it did.
It touched him on top of his head.
It brushed against his forehead.
He felt as if his grandma were kissing him with a light, dry kiss.
That feeling comforted him.
He saw up into the swirling cloud at looked at an old wooden loft that was there.
The loft was glowing with a soft yellow light and reminded him of the light in the first moments of sunrise.
That soft yellow light was coming from stacks and stacks of freshly picked corn in the loft, stacks wrapped in summer green husks pulled halfway down the ears revealing whole, full kernels of the corn.
A ladder was unfolding with a clickity, clackity, clunk to the foot of his mat.
He wanted to climb the ladder, but he didn’t want to climb the ladder.
All he could do was look through the swirling cloud up the ladder into the loft at the corn, and feel a feeling he had never felt before.
It was a feeling of joy.
An old black woman with hair as white as the inside of a baobab fruit and eyes as brown as the skin of a peanut descended the ladder and sat down at Thelonius’ left side.
She leaned over him and placed her hand on his head, a hand that looked as worn and broken as a sandal that had walked miles and miles of ragged rocky roads.
She whispered in his ear with a voice that was kind and tired.
“Thelonius, here’s a gift. Promise me one thing. Protect the gift. Use the gift. Be the gift.”
She turned to hobble away.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Where are you going?
“From where did you come?”
“What gift did you give me?”
“Why give it to me?”
She ascended the ladder and disappeared into the stalks of corn.
The ladder folded with a clickity, clackity, clunk to the top of the loft.
A strong wind blew against Thelonius’ face, blew so hard he closed his eyes tightly to keep the dust from blinding him.
When he opened his eyes , he saw his own room in his own house in his own neighborhood.
The cloud, the loft, the corn, the ladder and the woman were gone.
The first feeling of joy, the mysterious unknown gift and all kinds of questions remained.
A kernel of corn and a part of a husk were on the wooden floor beside him.
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