Look at this face. Sophie, post-Winter Concert:
Sophie had practiced all of her songs for us the night before, wearing her new dress for our impromptu bedroom dress rehearsal. She was so lovely, my heart nearly split in two. Tonight, before the concert, I did her hair in a “grownup” ponytail with a sparkly rhinestone butterfly barrette on one side, and watched her regard her fancy new self in the mirror with admiring awe.
It was a full house, our town’s version of Carnegie Hall. David whisked Hannah, in her deceptively sweet white dress, upstairs. (We try to fool onlookers for as long as possible about the child.)
Downstairs, I managed to score one miracle seat, second row center. Grand stroke of luck. During the concert, Sophie stood in the front row of singers, (mostly) perfectly composed, grinning at me shyly (“I have stage fright at things like this,” she told me before and after). I couldn’t see much stage fright. I could see her remembering to stand up nice and straight, to open her mouth wide for the high notes, to pay close attention to her music teacher. Our girl was just grand.
My smile stretched off the sides of my face and bumped into the woman beside me. The woman turned to me and asked, “Is she yours? That one there?”
I said, “Yep. She’s mine.”
The woman smiled. “She’s beautiful. Is she singing right to you?”
I said, “I think she really is.”
She really was. How lucky am I, to be serenaded by that face?
(Meanwhile, her sister, the H-Bomb, was terrorizing the balcony crowd. When they could take no more, David took her to the lobby, where she terrorized water fountains and dug up the potted plants with her fingers.)
P.S. Happy birthday to another grand stroke of good luck in this lifetime, my brother, Joe!
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