Dear Me,
That day in 10th grade English class at Little Rock Central High, Mr. Hudson made a comment as an example that sometimes things aren’t what they appear to be. He said, “I thought she was the ugliest girl I’d ever seen, but when she spoke, her face seemed to magically melt away and a glow took over that transmitted a different person, and she became the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.”
Nothing else stuck with me from that whole year except how cute he was, that he was 28, his chestnut brown wavy hair was always neatly combed, his small mustache - and that one statement.
How could a person be ugly and then at the flip of a nickel be beautiful? There’s something dark hiding in the woodpile that needed digging up.
But as much as I was burning to know how that could be, I couldn’t dig up the nerve to ask. He was too cute and I was too shy. Besides, he was a teacher and teachers were hard for me to warm up to. I didn’t think of them as people as much as I did a talking textbook. I even had trouble answering roll call, much less the agony of being asked to answer a question in front of the whole world. That’s probably why I was so skinny: I tried to make my body so invisible people wouldn’t notice I was there, like air. So I didn’t ask him.
But it kept gnawing on me. How could that be?
About a week later I saw him at a Tiger football game and mustered up a shy “Hi” My eyes were pulled to his right and there she was. With a proud smile he introduced me to a lady whose face was not just plain and homely. That would have been just a bit of a skip from barely attractive. Overall it smacked me as about as ugly as one of Granny’s homemade bars of lye soap. Her skin was cousin to a pancake ready to turn over to cook the other side. Her nose was of such a shape it could’ve been inspiration for a new kind of horned instrument. Her chin was small and fit up to her bottom lip like a Siamese strawberry with double hips on the bottom. Her small ears were stuck at a near right angle about a half inch lower than they should’ve been, jutting out through straight, mousy hair that grew in such a way as to try to soften the blow of this apparent amalgamation of misfortune.
I guess she was used to first-glance reactions like mine so there was not a twitch from her that she knew the impact. That was my first hint.
And Mr. Hudson went on after drinking in that last instant and said with smiling eyes, “Sue Flay is my fiance. We’ll be married next spring.” Stunned, I looked at Sue, who smiled and squeezed his hand.
Then she spoke. I don’t recall what she said because I was so astonished at the transformation. All the ugly magically vanished and a cloud of affinity flowed toward me like dandelion puffs in a gentle spring breeze. I had never seen anything like it. She glowed the ugly away and in its place was the beauty he spoke about. In fact, in an instant, my shallow opinions melted away and my eyes opened to a new level of understanding about her and anyone else I met from there on.
Thanks to Sue Flay, I found that behind any face is the spirit that is the person, which is sure different from their body and what it looks like. As I go forward, sometimes It’s a bit of a stretch to shed my blinders to see in the folks I meet that under every ugly is a beauty. After all, life is pretty good at slapping a person around enough to cover up some of the good stuff. But those moments when I meet a similar person and the sky opens with golden light and something like a hallelujah chorus, allowing me to see who they really are, the feel-good happens.
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