With Stevie Wonder set to appear at Caesars Casino across the border in Windsor, Canada at the end of this month, I couldn’t help wondering where all the time has gone. I checked out a 1963 video on YouTube of Stevie performing at the Motortown Revue at the Apollo Theater in New York City – fifty-five years ago! Yep, he was performing “Fingertips, Part 2.”
Whether you say “water under the bridge” or “water over the dam”, no matter. Truth is that a lot of h2o has trickled by during those years. We have written about reminiscing not only in our book Black and White Like You and Me but also occasionally in these blogs. In this blog, we are going way back to February 2, 2017. I know, that isn’t too long ago, but so many tremendous experiences have happened with our movement of spreading the message of racial harmony since the release of our book.
Cookie and I were like expectant fathers in the waiting room. (I know that today there is no such thing as fathers are right there for the delivery of the child, but in the good old days, we waited outside.) We wondered if the book would be healthy, whether it would be attractive, whether it would be accepted, whether it would look like Cookie or me. (just kidding on the last one) As we reflect on the last eighteen months, we are amazed at the amount of water that has passed under our bridge.
Driving together to a luncheon sponsored by the Novi Public Library and hosted by Julie Farkas its director, Cookie and I could not stop shaking our heads at the amazing amount of presentations we have given over these past eighteen months including this one in front of our largest crowd of 150 people. We never could have imagined how well this book and movement would have been accepted as we fretted before its release.
Our motto has always been that if we do the right thing for the right reason, God will take care of the rest. He has. Although we hope to sell a million books someday, that has never been the goal. Every time we present whether to a group of recovering addicts or a curious church congregation, we are pleased with our reception. People want to hear our message; people want to tell of their experiences; people want a harmonious world.
While it may be true that we haven’t brought a harmonica ala Stevie Wonder to our events yet and had people “clap their hands and stomp their feet a little bit louder,” we know that our message is getting through loud and clear because of the many requests we receive to share it. So “let’s just sing it one more time, come on, come on!”
