Faces
Obviously, it didn't last very long...look at that smile!
Look who's talking...and everyone thinks I'm the talker in the family!!
My family!!!
These boys of ours!
Faces say a lot about people, but do we really remember people by their faces? Sometimes, mostly those who we have come to know more intimately. A good friend of ours who hadn't seen Nicolas for quite a while said, "He still looks the same" but then she heard him laugh and she grinned as she continued "And his laugh is still the same too!"
What makes us memorable to people? Family and close friends have special traits that endear them to us. Sometimes it's a crooked smile or the way their eyes sparkle when they have pulled a fast one on you and are just waiting for you to catch on. Sometimes it is the way they laugh or snort when they laugh. Sometimes we recognize their walk, but whatever it is it makes them special to us.
About a week ago I went to the city and I stopped in at Winner's and decided to look through the purse section. I'm not a purse shopper, but for some reason I felt like wandering through that area. There were some great bargains and they had a huge clearance section. I fumbled my way through the mounds of purses hanging vicariously on the rack and managed to grab hold of a Liz Claiborne that was hanging way in the back, hidden behind a number of rather ugly bags. As I'm reaching through the web of purse handles to try and untangle the tags that inevitably wrap themselves around each other like magnets I hear another woman beside me swearing a blue streak as she bends down to pick up the third purse she has dropped on the floor.
She looked up at me and I smiled at her, not letting go of my Liz Claiborne because she looked like a serious shopper. Another couple of expletives come out of her mouth as she dropped another two purses right after she had just replaced the last purse she had knocked off the rack. It was a really bad chain reaction. I've been in that situation where you get so fed up with trying to win in a no win situation. The harder she tried the more purses fell off the rack. Her face was quite red as the colorful words continued to roll off her tongue so easily. We laugh as she grumbled about idiots who don't know how to hang purses back properly as she walked away quickly kicking that final purse under the rack so that it at least was out of the already crowded aisle.
I finally manage to untangle the purse I was after so that I could look at the price tag. Bingo! Big mark down price! As I straighten up another woman comes from the opposite side.
"Ohhh, I love that black purse is that a Liz Claiborne?" She comes at me full speed and my hand tightens it's grip on my grand find as I realize that I've encountered another professional shopper.
"Where did you find it?" She asks with an expletive thrown in for drama.
I explained that it was right there in the stack at the end.
The cursing was abundant as she expressed her sorrow at having missed the prize. I decided to stay and talk with this fellow shopper and talk we did. Her language was fully peppered with extras, but I found her very easy to talk too and she was really funny. We did not talk about anything important, she just wanted advice on a number of purses that she had dangling from her arm. And every other word was as colorful as the last. We landed up shopping together for about 20 minutes before I needed to move on.
I walked out of the store still smiling at her comedic remarks and motions, but by the time I left the city I had already forgotten her face. And for some reason that realization made me sad. She had not really left any impression on me except that for a few minutes out of my life she made me laugh. But, what about me? What impression did I leave? I'm sure she's long forgotten my face, but what about my conversation? What in that brief time spent together would have told her that I'm different? Nothing, except for my language style.
We sometimes spend so much time primping and preening to give the outward appearance of who we are, but when it comes to the guts of living how does anyone know that we are different?
"But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart..." Matthew 15:18
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