How Cinderella Teaches Grace

Love for a certain blonde haired, blue eyed, honey voiced Princess is in the air around here.  “I’ll be Cinderella, and you be the mean Stepsister who is nice” I’m commanded, usually multiple times a day.  I try my best to act my heart out in my somewhat antithetical role.

Little Friend, aka Cinderella, sings a certain song.  It’s from a Jap animation version of the fairy tale.  The version is too fast in all the wrong parts and too slow in all the right parts and has a soundtrack that I could have composed on my 1986 casio keyboard.  Little Friend loves the flick.

“Dream on, Cinderella” she sings (and that verse repeats about twelve times before starting all over again at the beginning.)  At least, I think she’s singing “dream on.”  Could be “dream of” or “dreaming” or “dream a” or “dreamer.”  Each time I try to sing it, I’m told “No, Druzilla {that’s the mean stepsister who’s nice, by the way}.  It’s Dream on {or whatever}!”

Little Friend, aka Cinderella, stands in the kitchen with a customary curtain of hair over her right eye, giving it a practiced but awkward head flop every so often.  Her thin voice is about two and a half notes off key.  She pictures herself in a floor length ball gown worthy of a wedding, but instead she’s wearing a blue, thin, stained, embroidered flowers around the collar frock from my own childhood.

She’s anything but graceful.

But the magic is, and I don’t even have to pretend for this one, is that she’s full of grace.  Grace that says the atonal singing is beautiful.  Grace that says her unruly hair couldn’t be more charming.  Grace that lets her rewrite the story line of a fairy tale, or moment, or life, to suit her imagination.

Grace-ful moments like these remind me in the most childishly simple (and therefore profound) way of my own awkwardness and a Lord who came along, encountered me in my rags, messy hair, and off-pitch life, and saw a Princess instead.

I’m again inspired to join in the 5-minute writing prompt this week with Lisa-Jo Baker.  Five minutes of unabashedly unedited writing and a few sips of coffee are just enough to get me crawling out of bed early on a Friday morning.