Caution.. BSO. read at your own risk.
In the not so distant past, we used to subscribe to our local daily newspaper. During each Christmas season, the paper publishes pages of "letters to Santa" from little kids. Most letters are printed and typed as is with errors and all. When my daughter was 7 or 8, she too wrote a letter as part of class project. We did not know about it untill we read the paper. We read every single letter (most are one or two sentences only), from start to finish, and did not find hers. When I was about to fold the paper to put it away, I saw in the middle of page, there was an hand-written letter decorated with a silly figure. I started to read it, to my surprise, the letter was signed by her. She asked for a pair of knitting needles for her and a toy train for her, with a ps to Mrs. Santa. That was her first newpaper "appearance". Unknown to us at the time, there were more newspaper appearance to come, in a positive sense.
Several years later, I took my son and his friends to a museum. My daughter's third grade teacher, who had recently retired, was leading a group activity. I introduced myself, and mentioned that my daughter would be thrilled to know who I had met, and I also causally asked about the possibility of her volunteering there. A few months a later, my daughter started volunteering on weekends and holidays. A few more months later, the director asked her if she could come in an early morning of a weekday becuase there was a scheduled live TV broadcast on that morning. On that morning, she was interviewed on live TV as a student representative. Neither my wife nor I watched becuase we did not know that it was live. Later on, I found or was given an url address to a video. I was impressed by her articulation and her sense of servic. Unfortunately, I did not write down the address for reference.
In her senior year, she got another recognition speaking on behalf of her school orchestra on live TV, again, we did not watch it, though we did read it in our local paper.
Her final recongization was to stand in front of her peers and teacher and deliver a speech, dotted by thunderous aapplause
BSO. End.
