MIDDLE C
When Lloyd C. Douglas, author of The Robe and other novels, was a university student, he lived in a boarding house. Downstairs on the first floor was an elderly, retired music teacher who was infirm and unable to leave the apartment. Douglas said that every morning they had a ritual they would go through together. He would come down the steps, open the old man’s door, and ask, "Well, what’s the good news?"
The old man would pick up his tuning fork; tap it on the side of his wheelchair and say, "That’s middle C! It was middle C yesterday; it will be middle C tomorrow; it will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the hall is out of tune,
but, my friend, THAT is middle C!"
The old man had discovered one thing upon which he could depend, one constant reality in his life, one "still point in a turning world."