High compliments

So, Angela asked us women the other night at the slumber party, "What is the greatest compliment you've ever received?" My answer was that when I was in a national chorus my junior year in high school, the drummer for the chorus noticed me getting a Diet Coke out of the soda machine (back then it was a pop machine to me) and he said, "Diet Coke? Oh like you need that." I remember it like it was yesterday, yet it bothered me that my greatest compliment ever had to do with my weight. Was that all I cared about - my appearance? Aren't there much more important things to worry about?

Well it no longer matters because last night I received what is now my greatest compliment ever. It happened to be one of my co-workers who said it to me. A different co-worker was having a candle party and had invited the ladies from work. I met a few of my work friends at a Mexican restaurant for margaritas and appetizers before the party at my co-worker's house. We began talking about this one guy at work who infuriates many of us with his ultra-conservative nature and prying into others personal lives. I mentioned to the ladies how different my views were from his and how he knows this and just tries to get me to argue with him. All of a sudden one of the ladies pipes in and says to me, "You know Beth, you are the most open-minded person from a small town I've ever met. How did you get that way?"

I told her that I felt that being valedictorian of my high school class (not that I consider myself a genius by any stretch of the imagination) allowed me contact with a lot of different people and unique ideas that others in my community had not, but she didn't think that was the reason. She told me about one of her friends who was also from a small town, smart and had many potentially mind-expanding opportunities as I had, but she still had the same closed-minded beliefs of those from her small community. I responded that if that was the case then I had no idea how I ended up the way I did, "I guess I just got lucky."

Considering how closed-minded I consider people from my home town and how closed-minded my parents can be, and how I strived to be the complete polar-opposite of people from home, those words were music to my ears!