Memorandum Monday

I hope you'll forgive me today if the Memorandum I make this Monday meanders on a course all its own. We've been celebrating a birthday here: the kind which brings with it firsts and lasts for everyone concerned. the kind I feel I'd like to mark with a note.

When I began to write about her here, on my blog, she became known as The Small One; and certainly she was small then, smaller than her older, taller brother. She was small, too, when she was born, as is the way in our family. Just as she arrived, the midwife turned to her Dad and said..and you have a ..?

..girl? he asked, hardly believing, and he lifted her, and held onto her, and several years later Granny said What will he do when that child has to go to school?  For she rode in his arms like a tiny queen, with one hand on his shoulder, the other raised in a miniature wave, all day if she could.

But go to school she did and her first report told us what we already knew: everyone is happy to be her friend. She is so lovely to look at, with a luminous beauty which seems to grow as she has grown; but yet she takes no account of it. She has no time for show, for vanity, for surface: whatever is in the inside is what she considers, and for this, her friends love her. They tell me she's an excellent listener, loyal, patient, thoughtful and, above all else, kind; and I agree. She is all of these things, but much more. She has a wickedly dry sense of humour, perfect timing, quick as a whip delivery. She can fix things, set them right, take them apart and put them together again; and, if she follows the career she has chosen for herself, I suspect she'll make an excellent job of doing the same with people. 

She reminds me of her Great Grandpa, for he too was a mender with a fine musical ear. He would have called her a good ole blow, I think, and laughed, and urged her  to play on: the flute, the piccolo, recorder, tin whistle, fife. She knows them all and performs with them often; though I was never as moved to see her on stage as I was the night she sang under the spotlight, just a little girl in a school gingham frock, with two friends, and the audience in the palm of their hands. She was brave that night. That's what she does. She does brave in a way I admire immensely. When she was little, we said she was lucky. But now we know how she conjures that luck: with determination, with grit. If she falls down, she gets back up; and it has been a joy to offer a hand here and there over the last eighteen years. 

I know that many of you have watched her grow over the last seven years, and I hope you'll join me in wishing her a very Happy Birthday.

We'll have eaten the cake and cleared up the wrapping paper by this time next week and normal service will be resumed, so don't forget...make a memorandum on Monday.

Last week Becky, Melissa, Deb, Helena, Eileen, Mitra, Maggie, Susanne, Karen, Ladkyis, Barbara and Mary-Lou shared what was new: how about you?