Imagine
That!
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I've just come home from the dentist. I must admit that going there has never been my favorite thing to do. My dentist is caring, gentle, and skilled,
but when he reclines the dental chair, I lie back and clutch the arms, my knuckles white. No matter how carefully he works, I can hear the scrunching and whirring going on inside my mouth, and it makes me tense.
This afternoon as I lay back in that chair with the dentist leaning over me,
I looked up beyond his head, and there on the ceiling was tacked a picture of Dr. Albert Schweitzer. My jaw was filled with equipment, but my eyes were free to study that drawing. It was a black-and-white sketch, and the longer I looked at it, the more I discovered.
Curiously, the picture was composed of all kinds of images of animals. I tried to identify them, one at a time. It was something of a challenge since my glasses are focused at quilt-frame distance. Dr. Schweitzer was somewhat fuzzy from where I was, but I discovered that the part in his hair was cleverly delineated by the tail of a skunk. There were birds of all sorts and animals with their feathers and bodies defining his features.
"There! All done!" said my dentist.
I stood up to get a closer look at the images. The artist had done an amazing job in arranging all those disparate parts into a human being. The way the animals were fit together, they could have been a quilt. The picture was drawn
exactly the way we piece a quilt such as a watercolor or a postage stamp or a mosaic quilt, all of the separate parts blending in and losing their individuality. Together they became a single picture.
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