Dear Moment Monday

Dear Moment,
I still hate you a little bit.

I mean, really...I know I do a lot of embarrassing things. I make it pretty easy to poke fun...but in all honesty, you could have let that one go by. You could have NOT humiliated me in front of everyone I've ever met in my entire life. You could have NOT made my most embarrassing moment EVER happen in front of half of the people in my senior class.

Moment...you could have just blown by. Quietly. Almost, dare I suggest, UNNOTICED. It would have been the decent thing to do.

But no...you had to take full advantage of the opportunity that I handed you. Shame on you. SHAME. ON. YOU.

It wasn't like I had a choice. She made me do it. And how are you supposed to say "no" to the sweetest most arthritic old lady you ever met? How? You can't. Hence, the embarrassment. I even tried to back out at the last minute. But she told me I was ready. She told me it would be fine. She told me it would "bless her little heart" if I went through with it. What was I supposed to do? What else IS there to do?

Absolutely Freakin' Nothing.

So I sat there...in front of half the people I think I've ever met in my entire life....20 other members of my senior class looking on....tears running down my face....embarrassment creeping up my neck disguised as ugly red blotchiness...

And everything I had learned...everything I had practiced...everything I had in me that would "bless her little heart"....

must have stayed out in the parking lot.

But, as the onlookers would try to comfort me with later, at least I kept going. At least I didn't give up. At least I didn't let it get the best of me. And in the final moments of my encounter with utter embarrassment, I poised my hands in the position that I knew they were supposed to end in, plucked an A, the only distinguishable note during this entire episode, and as always made a graceful exit from

the piano recital from hell.

Dear Moment, just so we're clear....sometimes you don't have to be so good at your job of "imprinting so as not to be forgotten." Every now and then it's ok for you to be a wallflower....to linger only as a "yeah, I vaguely remember this one time....but it's sort of fuzzy" kind of recollection. Sometimes....just every now and then...it's ok not to share.

(Which, ironically enough, is what all of the recital attendees were saying after I finished playing that night.)