This is not going to be easy to write. Not because it’s a complicated story, but because I don’t think words can convey the impact a compliment can have. From a stranger. Paid to me.
So there I was, minding my own business, in the parking lot at Fashion Island. I had just exchanged a dress I received for Mother’s Day and pulled my iPhone out to post something on Instagram. This cute photo of a kitten in a pet store window:
I heard a male voice saying “excuse me” and I looked up, startled.
“Sorry I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said.
He was a very good-looking man in his late 20s or early 30s, wearing blue doctor’s scrubs. He had a really nice smile, dark skin and dark curly hair. I thought he was going to ask me for directions to a particular store in the mall and I waited, smiling back expectantly.
“I just had to tell you”–he hesitated–”I just had to tell you how absolutely gorgeous you look.”
He repeated himself, probably because my face registered so much shock at a purely spontaneous, unmotivated compliment like that, I must have appeared to have lost my mind.
“You look gorgeous.”
Finally discovering I still had a voice, I smiled widely and said, “Well, thank you, you totally made my day.”
He turned to his car and said, “I just had to blurt that out.”
I got in my car, he got in his and that was that.
As I drove home, I was trying to analyze why this offhand compliment from a stranger affected me so much. Could it possibly be because I had not received any comment like that from a reasonably attractive, sane, non-panhandler type of guy in….well….maybe 10 years? maybe 15?
Could it be that although I try very hard to look my best at all times, I don’t think that I am very pretty?
Could it be that as I face a big birthday milestone in a week, I found this casual encounter to be almost divinely ordered? That God took a moment for a small, trivial bit of conversation between two people and gave it a soul-changing importance?
I’m trying very hard not to make more of this than it is. A compliment from a stranger.
I just want to thank that guy, whoever he is, and hope that one day when he is a bit older, with kids and a mortgage and trying to look his best, that he will be blessed by a compliment from a stranger. And I hope that I can carry this feeling of joy and pay it forward by noting beauty in others when they need to hear it most.
