Happiness is for pigs.

At least, that was my father's observation.  He was raised on a farm and perhaps his pig encounters lacked the nobility he hoped to find in life.

Joy, he observed, was a grand ballroom, filled with music and meaning.  It came not from getting but from giving.  Not from talking about things but from doing well those things which made the world a perhaps more beautiful place.

As a musician, he had an uncommon bent among the classicists of his generation.  He reached not for perfection but for the magic that music could work in the souls of the performers and the hearers.  With choirs and orchestra, he would paint a musical masterpiece that would persist in your memory for years, change your worldview, your theology, and your life's goals.

From 1960 with one of his college

choirs.  A capella, if I recall this one.

Now decades after his passing, I still remember.  It still brings tears to my eyes as the extraordinary beauty of it and the nobility of it rises up yet again in me.

I'm forever blessed and encouraged by it all.  So are the many who walked that path with him and with mom in those years.  More than fifty years have passed, and folks from those days still call from time to time, students most of them, and they still shine with the glow of what touched them then, and that's joy.