Tenor Emotion! :)

Last night was our annual Girls Choir Caroling night. We did things a little different this year. Instead of driving all around Lincoln, we just caroled at St. Elizabeth Hospital. (For those of you who don't know, St. Elizabeth is a huge hospital here in Lincoln. It's also the hospital I went to when I broke my arm in that four wheeler wreck.) There were 35 Girls Choir members there (so about 3/4 of our choir). Before we started, my director, Teresa, told me that most of the alto parts were boring and easy and that I could sight read tenor if I wanted to. My face lit up, and then she said, "I know you'll be our only 'tenor', but we all know you can out-sing this entire choir." All 35 of us sang in the entry way/lobby of the hospital as many people walked by and smiled at us.

We sang for roughly an hour, and then a lady who goes to our church came up to our director and told us that there were two members of our congregation in the hospital and that they would love to be sang to. So, Teresa chose 6 girls (me being one of them) and we went up to sing to these people. We sang on our way up there, and we started out with Silent Night. I love the harmonies to this song: the sopranos with the melody, the altos a third away from them, and the 'tenor' a sixth away from them. It was beautiful. Between the six of us, we had 3 sopranos, 2 altos, and a 'tenor'. As we walked down the hallway, I saw a fairly young woman in a wheelchair, she looked very ill and sickly. Snug in her arms was a newborn baby. As we sang Silent Night, this woman was crying, the subtle tears dripping onto the pink baby blanket. I started to choke up, and then the warm relentless tears were streaming down my face as well. Next, we saw an old woman, she was limping into a hospital room where an old man, it must have been her husband, was sleeping, she was crying as well. She grabbed his hand, and bent her head over it as if she was praying. He opened his eyes at the touch of her hand, and started crying as well. This made me tear up even more, there is something about a man crying that gets me every time.

Finally we came to the room we were looking for. This girl is a freshman, and she had just had back surgery. We sang her a couple of songs, and kindly thanked her and her mother. Next, we went to the room of an elderly lady. This lady had a granddaughter who is in our choir, but was not there that night. We sang to her, and then headed back down to the lobby, hoping that the rest of the choir had gotten along with out us. We came down to good news, my best friend Kara came running up to me pointing at her ring finger and smiling. I knew instantly what had happened. Her older sister's boyfriend had finally proposed. Nicole, Kara's older sister, was our nanny for a couple of years (she always tells embarrassing stories about how naughty we were). Soon after, I heard my Daddy pull up, there is no mistaking the ferocious roar of the diesel engine. Kara's momma pulled up at roughly the same time. Kara's momma is like my second momma. I call her mommy, and I tell her that I love her and such. (Same with Kara towards my momma.) I walked up to their van, she rolled down the window and I said, "Hello Mommy!" She replied with, "Well hello dear!" Then as Kara got into the passenger seat I said, "Are you excited to be a mother-in-law?" She looked at me like I was the most crazy person in the world and kept repeatedly saying "What?". Kara looked over and said, "Mom... you don't know?? Nicole got engaged!" Holy awkward. She looked at both of us and then said, "No, when did that happen??" She was freaking out, and frankly, so was my Daddy, so I had to go. I told them I loved them and then climbed into our annoyingly over-sized pick-up.

I have no idea why Nicole didn't tell her mother about being engaged, apparently Zach had called Kara's dad to "ask permission", but Clark did not pass on the information to his wife. I told Daddy what happened, and that led into a 45 minute long rant about how "Any boy that wants to date my daughter will ask permission properly. And he will surely not be able to just propose to my daughter with out a proper 'talking to'." I love my Daddy. I replied with, "You're version of 'a proper talking to' is scaring the crap out of the poor guy. You're pretty intimidating Dad." He said, "Of course I am, that's my job. No jack wagon is going to take my daughters away from me." (He didn't say jack wagon, he said another word that I don't wish to repeat.) And then I got another long speech about acceptable dating age and such. Sometimes I think my parents think I am on some crazed man-hunt... Newsflash: I'm not. They over-protect because they love, or so I keep telling myself.