I WANT TO SHARE two items with you today. Both are different, yet alike, because they’re about differences. Differences between cultures and differences between states.
Humbird Cheese, a popular tourist stop at Tomah, Wisconsin.
Let’s start with the humorous of the two, a little story from my second daughter, who lives in eastern Wisconsin.
Along with a photo, she sent this text message: “They teach them early in wi.”
I studied what appeared to be a child’s drawing of a hefty hunk of cheese and a mouse, along with words too miniscule to decipher on my cell phone screen.
M: “It was a drawing with a haiku in a surgery dept waiting rm. Can u read the haiku or is it too small?”
Me: “I can’t read it.”
M: “It says ‘I love to eat cheese. Swiss Colby pepperjack too. I’m almost a mouse.’ By devon age 9.”
Honestly, don’t you just have to laugh at the subject of this haiku. Of all “the things I love,” this 9-year-old Wisconsinite wrote about cheese?
Would a Minnesota child ever choose to write a cheese haiku?
Wisconsin, I love your cheese, really I do. And I love how your kids love your cheese.
Numerous cultures were represented during the International Festival held in September at Central Park in Faribault. Here singers perform the Mexican national anthem in the band shell.
NOW TO THE OTHER STORY about differences, written by sports reporter Brendan Burnett-Kurie and published Sunday on the front page of The Faribault Daily News. Here’s the headline for that top-notch feature, which should be required reading in every Faribault (maybe even Minnesota) classroom and home:
“The beautiful team…How the Cannon Valley soccer team bridged cultural gaps and came together around the game they love.”
I tipped Brendan off to this story after my good friend Mike Young told me about the soccer team at Cannon Valley Lutheran High School in Morristown. Mike serves as the school’s volunteer development director. Yes, you read that correctly. Volunteer.
But back to Brendan’s story. He wrote about the school’s recently-rejuvenated soccer team which includes a melting pot of students—of different ethnic backgrounds, different sizes, different ages and from different schools. (CVLHS, with less than 20 students, couldn’t field a team solely from within.)
It’s one of those feel-good stories that make you smile. These boys became a team and became friends. Differences didn’t matter to them. Not differences in their skin colors, their heights, their ages, their shoe sizes, their anything.
Brendan writes: “One day during practice they all took off their shoes and flipped over the tongues, comparing the sizes. Little fourth-grader Yianko Borrego had size 4 feet. The largest were size 13.”
These boys can all teach us a thing or a hundred about acceptance.
FYI: To read Brendan’s outstanding feature, click here.
© Copyright 2011 Audrey Kletscher Helbling
