My friend worked to get me to try The Week, a magazine that comes out weekly and is therefore more expensive than many. I began reading it. At first CNN's newsletter "Five Things" cover the big events going on and I didn't pay much attention to The Week. Over the months, I found that the little items, inserted below the big headlines, were the most fun and the most positive and the most unusual. You know you aren't going to sell many copies with headlines like "All's well!" and "Ain't Life Grand?"
As you can imagine, being a father, I am not equipped to give birth and I have never even come close. Still, I notice that seeing a toddler or maybe just the face of someone leading a toddler or holding a newborn with delight lifts my spirits. We have watched enough "Call the Midwife" and "Babies" to know that the sound of a newborn protesting the confusing, compressing experience of being squeezed into the world is a delightful sound. So, I applaud the imagination of Jessica Martin, the art teacher and her colleague Ashera Weiss at Westside Elementary School in Healdsburg, Calif. who created a hotline for adults to get advice from little kids. The hotline is called "Pep Toc" and offers recordings from children as young as kindergartners on bucking up, cheering up, counting one's blessings and such.
Here is a shortened link to The Week page that gives the story.
t.ly/VyJO Scroll down and enlarge the screen to see the article. The Pep Toc number is 707-998-8410,
The sight and sound of little children can lift warriors and the depressed, too. You don't have to be a kid to benefit.
