Someone Said I Was Beautiful Today

I went to Starbucks to get a chai tea latte today, and the greatest thing happened. The woman behind the counter handed me my hot concoction and said "Here you go beautiful..."

And it made my day.

Now, I have no doubt that she uses that with everyone. She's probably one of those personalities that calls people "cutie," "honey," and "beautiful," but so what? It made me feel special for about 2 seconds. Okay, at least 10 minutes.

Somehow my days of being called beautiful on a semi-regular basis left me about 10 years ago. I'm not saying I was a great beauty, but youth seems to attract the kind of compliments that we miss as we get older. I remember my mom once was so thrilled when a strange man told her how beautiful she was and I was thinking soooooo. How stupid was I? At the time I was thinking, well yeah, she is beautiful (my mom was a serious beauty) so what's the big deal? I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that as we get older we get a little less approachable, definitely more guarded. The open-faced child of 10-15 years past isn't there anymore with the assumption that life will continue to stroke our fragile egos as often as we might wish. How did those days go by so fast?

Now I'm told how beautiful my daughter is. And as much as I miss hearing it myself, I'm not jealous. I love to see her face light up when she hears that and she remains wonderfully modest too. I'm very proud of my beautiful little girl.

But every now and then, it's nice to be reminded that I might have a little something left that glows just a tiny bit with the radiance of youth I see in my kids. That someone might in fact think that I could be beautiful still.

I'm going back to Starbucks tomorrow.