Mini-Me

Dear Friend,

I'm in America and having a blast. I've been hanging out with my aunt, cousins, grandma, and friends from College. Sometimes I feel like I am a ball being juggled back and forth from house to house. You see, I want to hang out with my closest friends here, in addition to my cousins, so almost ever night I sleep at a different persons house depending on what I am doing the next day. But it is so fun to hang out with them! I have laughed so much in the past 2 weeks. It is so much fun!

So recently I have heard some funny stories about when I was little, and I must say, after hearing the stories I am very proud of little-me.

If you know me, you know that I like to talk. It wasn't a 'skill' that was developed gradually; apparently, I have always liked to talk. My mom said that when I was little, I would sit in my crib and happily talk with myself. Who knows what I was saying, or to whom I was talking, but the fact remains, there I was sitting in my crib chatting up a storm with no one in particular. I guess talking to yourself is another skill that develops at an early age!

Speaking of talking to yourself, I was reading Anne of Avonlea recently and L.M. Montgomery captures the essence of talking to oneself perfectly! Here is the quote:

"Anne keenly enjoyed her walk through the great gray maze of the beechlands; though alone she never found it lonely; her imagination peopled her path with merry companions, and with these she carried on a gay, pretended conversation that was wittier and more fascinating than conversations are apt to be in real life, where people sometimes fail most lamentably to talk up to the requirements. In a "make believe" assembly of choice spirits everybody says just the thing you want her to say and so gives you the chance to say just what you want to say."                       ~pg. 262~

If you talk to yourself, perhaps you understand this quote, because this is the point where I felt Anne and I could have been kindred spirits. The part about the conversationalists saying just what you want them to say in your imaginations is so true. In real life... the conversations never take the turns that you want them to. I find that when I talk to 'myself' I am much more bolder than in real life. Do you talk to yourself?

Another couple of stories I heard about little-mini-me take place in Switzerland when I was 9 years old. This is where I gained the nick-name Rebekah-sapeka. Sapeka is slang for clever or mischievous in Portuguese. Here is the reason why I gained the nick-name.

My relatives from Brazil were visiting us and we were all eating a meal around our table. Perhaps it was a messy meal because apparently I was licking my fingers a lot. I always ate with my fingers when I was little, and naturally as a 9 year old if my fingers are dirty, I will lick them. Well, my uncle did not like this and he kept telling me not to lick my fingers. At one point when he told me not to lick them, I deliberately licked all my fingers Curly Sue style. If you don't know what that is, ask me sometime and I'll try to explain it to you. That is when my uncle, after thinking for a little while, said, "Sapeka, Becka-Sapeka, that is what your name should be."

During their visit, they kept inviting me to go to Brazil with them. I would join in on the joke and say, "Yes, yes, I'll go with you." In fact, they day they were leaving, I grabbed my little suitcase, dragged it down the stairs and declared, "OK! I'm ready to go!" I don't think I had actually packed anything, I was just playing along with the joke. When I heard that story, I was very proud of mini-me for going that far with the joke.

Well, those are the only new mini-me stories that I have heard recently. Normally I'm the one in the family that says, "Remember when..." and my sisters would look at each other, smile and say, "No." That's when I would tell the story and we would all laugh. I have enjoyed being able to say, "No, I don't remember that," and then getting to laugh at the new stories I hear.

Well friend, I would love to hear about the mini-you. Do you have any stories to share?
Your friend,
Rebekah