Stephanie Says.. Take a walk inside my head

October 9, 2007

Thankfulness

Filed under: Gratitude — srose @ 10:03 pm

This one is for someone who probably will never see this post, but who is a big encouragement to me and deserves mentioning.

See, when I do solos, I tend to sing songs that my grandmother and her generation taught me.  I’ve done “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” twice (despite the fact that my Sunday School teacher doesn’t like it), “His Eye Is On the Sparrow” three times and even got brave and did “Day by Day” a cappella once.

As a result, when I go to the bathroom between Sunday School and church, I’ll invariably run into someone or other from the senior set who compliments me for a couple weeks afterward on my singing. I’m smart enough to realize that it’s my preferred genre, not my vocal ability that they are really exclaiming over, but the praise is nice all the same.

This is where Paul Steely comes in.  Paul is a deacon in our church who, like my bathroom buddies, is also a member of the senior set.  Paul is the one person who comes up to me -before- the service and tells me that he enjoys it when I do the “specials”.  Paul apparently is like me and reads the bulletin before church.

He did this again Sunday night.  He stuck out his hand to take mine and said he was looking forward to hearing me.  At that point, that made one of us.  See, about four months ago, I did “The Old Rugged Cross”.  Er…that is, I tried to do “The Old Rugged Cross”, but I messed up.  I know, I know, it’s hard to mess up something as foundational as a hymn I’ve known since utero, but I did.

As a result, I lost my confidence.  Even with the best Minister of Music since my dad supporting me, my confidence was shot.  As a result of -that-, my voice disappeared.  I couldn’t sing in the shower anymore, couldn’t sing to my preschoolers, nothing.  Nada, zip, zilch.  And don’t even get me started on choir practice.

Then, Sunday night, along came Paul.  As I was shoring up my courage to try and climb those stairs again, Paul took out his hand and smiled at me.  Not only that, he stood iby the door  in my line of sight so I could focus on him while I sang.  Okay, so that part was a fluke as he was standing in position to take the offering later, but it was nice and I took it as a gift.

So, there it is.  A mini tribute to a man I hardly know yet owe a debt of gratitude for a kindness he wasn’t even aware he was paying. 

Thank God for the Pauls.  Isn’t it nice to know someone is watching, waiting to hold out their hand? 

 

 

It’s all Tracy Lord’s fault

Filed under: Glimpses of Me — srose @ 4:48 am

I am not sophisticated in the least.  I’m not even a girly-girl, not really.  I’m clumsy, I haven’t worn a dress in
ever, and I take too much pleasure in discarding things to be a collector of rainbows or unicorns or stuffed
animals.

Something glamorous, however, must eek out of me in certain situations.  The first time I really thought
about this was in tenth grade.  I had been invited to a mystery dinner.  This remains the only mystery dinner
I’ve ever been to, so I have no way of knowing if all work like ours did, but to me a mystery dinner is one where
the menu items (including the silverware) are labled by some other name. Our theme was “The Farm” so the fork might
have been labeled as a shovel and corn as slop and so on and so forth.  (I somehow snagged a copy of the menu if
you’d like to see it.)

The courses each teenager were served depended on the numbers written beside each menu item.  So, if we picked
numbers 1, 14 and 27 for our first course, we might end up being served peaches, hamburger and a napkin first and
soda, chocolate cake and a spoon next.  If we guessed wrong and selected an order that didn’t include any kind of
flatware, we were out of luck.

Most of us ended up sticking our faces into our plates at some point during the evening but no one commented on it
until it was my turn.  I was seated across from a girl named Elisabeth who was everything I was not.  Elisabeth
was popular, but not in any vulgar kind of way.  Elisabeth had Class, with a capital C.  Apparently, she believed
that I did too, because she stopped me as I was about to individually pick up my beans and finger feed
myself.  She was the first person to ever say “You’re not the kind of girl whom I ever thought would eat with
your fingers.”

I realize this could have been meant as some kind of snotty insult, but I don’t think so.  Like I said,
Elisabeth was nice.  She had Class.

The second conversation in which someone decided to mention my hidden depths of mysterious elegance was around
the time that “Portrait of a Lady” was released.  I was in college and my friends and I tended to take long lunches
during which we would sit in the cafeteria for hours and talk about whatever we were thinking about that day.

One of our favorite games was to play “If your life were a movie, who would play you and why?”  It was Natalie who
suggested Nicole Kidman should play me.  (Keep in mind this was fifty pounds and three hair colors ago.)   At
the time, Nicole Kidman was the most beautiful actress we could imagine. For Natalie to suggest her was high praise
indeed because I am many things, but ladylike is not one of them.

I don’t know if I appear to be glamorous.  I suspect that I do not as I am continually spilling things into people’s
laps and tripping over my own feet.  But while I’m stumbling around, it’s nice to think of myself as someone
else.  Someone with class.  Someone with sophistication.  Somone whom Nicole would like to portray.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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