Young Lady

Young Lady is the spitting image of me – my replay button stuck when I hear her playing teacher, playing mother, playing general, expounding on subjects she knows nothing about and ordering people hither and fro.  I don’t know how to press the pause button at times and it freaks me out.

When we were walking home from school today, Young Lady’s “amoureux” Ilan was walking along with us.  I mean, this kid is gorgeous – a smile from ear to ear, long straight blond hair that hangs in his big blue eyes, cool clothes and jaunty step even at tender the age of five.  You just know he’s going to be a heart-breaker when he gets older. (He had better be breaking someone else’s heart).

He’s a year younger than she is, but the class is split so fate threw them together.  He seems to like her and carries on a determined conversation with himself, his face partly turned in her direction.  He yells at the bigger girl he’s walking with that he’s not talking to her when she has the misfortune to say, “what?”  Young Lady is conscious of his every word although she smiles to herself and doesn’t answer.  She marches confidently along in the power she exudes having worn her blue skirt that twirls.

Young Lady is beautiful too, bias aside.  She got her father’s athletic build with tiny wiry arms that looked beautiful today in a little white tee shirt with capped sleeves.  She has a long torso, elegantly set off by the swinging navy polka dot skirt and little ballet flats at the end of long slender legs.  She has thick blond hair and her own set of green eyes. She’s going to be a heart-breaker too (and can break anyone’s heart she pleases).

But beauty will come to nothing if she cannot temper her tongue.  In the series Cranford that I’m re-watching (I’m such a sucker for classics), one woman advises another who expresses her fears at having no interesting conversation to catch a suitor, “Men do not care how well you talk, as they do how well you listen.”  (Indulge me as I talk in antiquated extremes and know that I am not quite so archaic).

I hope Young Lady will find her own pause button one day, and not care so much about what she has to say.  Or send her suitor’s letter back to him with all the spelling mistakes underlined in red.  Or mock a suitor in front of his friends.  Or talk a suitor’s ear off so successfully that his glazed regard only finds clarity in another girl crossing his line of vision.

Fortunately for Young Lady, she has time to learn all of things.

“Ilan,” she calls with a giggle.  “I burped!”

* This post originally appeared in my former blog, Perfect Welcome, and may contain some modifications or discrepancies in the names or comments.

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