Perspective

I spent my first week back here in Sioux Falls playing kiddie shows. Now, I do enjoy working with our younger audiences, but I'm also perfectly happy to retire The Story of the Woodwind Family until next season.

We play at a number of after-school programs, but also places like CCHS, which treat children with life-altering physical and mental conditions, or places like CHS, where many of the children have been the victims of physical or emotional abuse.

I'm not one to become all worked up doing these sorts of programs. I don't go home and cry for hours on end at the unfairness of it all. Life is unfair to all of us, at various times and to various degrees. But audiences like this do make you think about how often we all take the big things for granted.

Sometimes our lives become wrapped up in the silliest little matters. Maybe that E wasn't quite in tune, but when I'm done with the show, I can still go outside for a walk and fully comprehend and appreciate everything that I see. Or I can go for a bike ride, because I have sufficient control of my physical capacities to do that. I don't have problems relating to other adults because my mom hit me when I was a kid and told me she didn't love me. I can spend two hours at a science museum with a seven-year-old kid whose assistance I needed to get past step 6 of making that origami frog that you see.

That was hard, by the way. But the frog hops when you push down on the back. It's pretty sweet.

There are so many things that are more important than the things we, at any given moment, think are important. And sometimes we all need something to pull us from our little self-centered worlds in order to remember that.