I’ve got so much to tell y’all, if I could only hold onto my Nashville accent until I can finally write that blog post on our visit to the music city. We’re here, after all, and I’ve got a hysterical story that I can’t wait to tell. But I’ve got to pull in the reigns and come back to this week.

My life’s a whirlwind, so it’s hard to take this one week at a time. But, alas, I’ve got to. Otherwise, I’ll rush through and miss the fun stuff along the way.

It was a week of firsts, starting with Alexandra playing Horton in her first play since Covid blacked out the theater and ending with the first time we flew as a family since Covid banned us from the skies on a plane so small thank goodness I chose small breasts (bigger ones wouldn’t fit in that seat). Not to mention, we celebrated Alexandra’s birthday here, too.

So this brings me back to my point for this week’s blog. My favorite lyric from Suessical, Jr. that Zana sang: “A person’s a person no matter how small.”

When Zana got on that stage and acted so humbly as Horton, it could bring tears to your eyes, even if you weren’t her mother. It was an anthem to remember: even us small people matter.

This whole concept of big and small came from my Mom. It’s all her fault. One Christmas, my Dad, asked for my help picking out a present for Mom. He wanted to know should he get Mom big or small diamond earrings. Of course, I didn’t know the drill, and I said, “small.”

Mom later set the record straight, “Whenever you have a choice between big or small, always pick big.”

So when it came time to pick-your-own size, I had Mom’s voice in my head. Small pumpkins or big ones? So when I said I wanted them to be small, even my plastics doctor warned me and looked at me gravely, “Most women want to go bigger.”

I’m not exactly sure what happened in that operation since I wasn’t awake for it, but my plastics doctor announced afterward that I was a proud parent of small breasts. Well, she said, “I put in the big ones but gave you the small ones. You were right; the big ones looked ridiculous.”

Yes, I vaguely remember using that word with her. She was quoting me, after all, even though everyone in the operating room had a look-see, and the consensus was to go with the bigger ones. My small voice mattered more than anyone else’s, and my doctor took them out and put in the smaller ones.

I’m not sure what she was thinking listening to me. What do I know about these things anyway?

Ah, yes, another breast story. Maybe I should start calling these Best of The Breasts.

But it brings me back to last week’s show. I made clover pens–135 of them, minus all the ones we kept for ourselves because they were so darn cute.

And MCT wanted to sell them for $1. Ahem, with all the work I put into those pens, look at them. Don’t you think these are worth more than a buck? Just think what my small breasts are worth. Not everything small should be so cheap.

I insisted that they sell for $2. And I heard Skylar’s voice in my head, “Here you go again doing all that work, and for what?” And, yes, I could have donated the money and tripled, heck, quadrupled the amount of money they raised on those pens. (It’s a non-profit, so raising money is important to them).

But just when I realized the pens weren’t worth all the time I put into them, I saw a little boy holding his pen. I thought he was eating it because he was sticking it up to his mask.

Afterward, I told everyone about this strange boy eating the clover pen, but then I remembered how he was holding it up to his ear, just like Horton. Oh my gosh, it finally dawned on me; he was talking to the little people and listening for them to talk back. I distinctly remember that, too.

My daughter saw another little girl doing the same thing with her clover pen during the show.

It melted my heart. “See, this is why I made those clover pens.”

And, then, after the show, they asked me if I could donate my clover pens for the Halloween trick-or-treating festival for the kids with sensory issues. Of course, I made the pens for those beautiful kids, too.

Just as “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” so too is an action. It doesn’t matter how small our efforts might be; we are making a difference.

Sometimes we think we’re not big enough. Or maybe we don’t have big enough boobs, or in Gertrude Mcfuzz’s case, she didn’t have a big enough tail.

But Horton’s there to remind us; it matters, we matter, no matter how small.

And there was the woman behind me, and she wasn’t even Horton’s mother, I know that for a fact, who exclaimed, “Poor Horton.”

Sometimes it was hard to watch. Zana was so believable, so sad. But the point wasn’t so far-fetched. We’ve all felt that moment where what we do isn’t big enough. We can all relate to feeling so small.

And to prove it, last year, one year ago, I started chemo on October 7th. Ever since, I confused it with Zana’s birthday. I mixed the two dates so much that Zana came home and blamed me for what had happened.

Someone had asked her when her birthday was, and she gave my chemo start date instead. She said, “See how you’ve got me saying the wrong date. I’ve forgotten my own birthday.”

Sometimes these little things add up to a whole lot more than we think they do. Keep on plugging along. Do the little things. Think small because y’all never know what grand ole celebrations will come of it.