Bracelets have never been among my personal accessories all these years, but I have been wearing a couple lately.
They were not very expensive, so I don’t have to worry much about securing them like I do my other jewelry.
Actually, my entire collection of bling is in a fake leather jewelry box that I got for high school graduation.
There are some old Timex watches, a senior class ring and a few tie clips that went out of style when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House.
My new bracelets are made of miniature rubber bands. One is blue and white, and the other is purple and orange. The colors clash, but I wear them both at the same time.
Our youngest granddaughters, who are in elementary school, are making the bracelets. They have joined with some friends in a plan to mass produce the colorful wrist bands.
Their goal is to sell them for a dollar apiece and send all of the money to the St. Jude Hospital. They have seen St. Jude kids in television commercials and wanted to help.
There will not be much overhead for their charitable project. Money just from the bracelets they sold me should buy enough rubber bands to fund the whole operation.
They will handle the labor themselves. It took them just a couple of minutes to make my bracelets, and they were working slowly trying to teach me how to do all the loops and links.
I attempted it and decided I could build a single engine airplane about as easily as I could interlace tiny rubber bands into bracelets.
This is not a school project, but the girls did indicate that one of their teachers planted the seed for their efforts to do something worthwhile for other children.
Teachers have been doing things like that for a long time. My third grade teacher Mrs. Bearden inspired within her students a compassion for animals and especially dogs.
When stray dogs wandered across the school yard, she sent kids to the cafeteria for milk and leftovers to feed them.
She would take the dogs to her house or send them home with one of us until she could find families to adopt them.
Our parents got notes from her requesting blankets, dogfood, and other stuff to care for the strays. Their donations filled the closet in our classroom.
Dogs have captured my heart ever since. Just last week, it made national news when a stray mutt in North Carolina kept running into a Dollar Store and trying to escape with a stuffed purple unicorn.
It was the same unicorn every time. The store called Animal Control, and the officer who responded solved the problem by buying the dog the stuffed toy with her own money and helping find him a home.
Pictures in the media of the dog cuddling the unicorn made me smile even as my eyes ran over a little.
Wearing the bracelets our granddaughters are making to support St. Jude and reflecting on the passion for dogs a teacher instilled in me long ago reminded me of a classic old country song.
Tom T. Hall wrote Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine in the 1970s, and it went to No. 1 on national country music charts.
Quoting an old man he met in a bar, Hall wrote, “Ain’t but three things in this world that’s worth a solitary dime. But old dogs and children and watermelon wine.”
Then, “Old dogs care about you even when you make mistakes. God bless little children when they’re still too young to hate.”
St. Jude won’t build a new hospital with donations from the rubber band bracelets, and the purple unicorn the officer bought the stray dog won’t make much of a dent in animal abuse.
But those acts of kindness are rays of light amidst the darkness that has enveloped us for all these months.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES