12.01.2008

Sticks with Me














To fix this!

I was walking across campus this morning, enjoying my breakfast banana, heading down from the Bookie towards Sloan. The sun was burning off the fog that has held Pullman in its grip these last few days, and I was reminded of a story I’d long forgotten.


It is the complements said behind your back that are the truest – said out of reach of your own ears. Once when staying with some friends who were hosting a party an unbidden guest showed up. I was in the kitchen helping prepare when one of the daughters of the house rushed in to tell her mother of this odd person who had arrived. Looking her daughter in the eye with a smile on her face, she told her to go and observe her father and watch how well he would handle the situation, “Watch your Dad – He’ll do great”. The confidence and affection she has for husband is still fresh in my memory. Her daughter went and watched and even from the kitchen, I could hear him making the unbidden guest at home. I could hear him; hear the genuine welcome in his voice, and as those of us in the kitchen returned to preparing for the coming party – I realized that and not for the first or last time – that I could learn a lot from these two.

These are things that have stuck and will stick with me. To hear and see love, to see it lived in the quiet moments of life around me, to see it in the words and actions of friends and strangers – to find it in the actions of a four year old, to hear it in my Grandmother’s voice when she tells the stories of Grandpa - it sticks with me.


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