So early last week, I started planning out what I would say about my young friend, trying to keep it fairly short, knowing that there were many other kids in her class who would all have people speaking on their behalf as well. I am a terribly inexperienced public speaker who gets extremely nervous in front of people, so I wanted to make sure I had everything I wanted to say carefully written out. I compiled about a one page "speech" about Quillen, and then arrived at Raintree on the evening of the 17th to find that there were way more people there than I imagined, and I had to sit up on the stage with Quillen, which made me even more nervous!
Unfortunately, I was the second "special guest" to speak, and the first person didn't really give me a very good example of what people normally talked about! I went up with my notes, but tried hard not to just read the speech word for word. It probably would have been a lot more coherent if I had, but Chad tells me that it wasn't obvious that I was so incredibly nervous! This is what I was supposed to say, for what it's worth:
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I’m very honored that Quillen asked me to speak on her behalf tonight, because she’s become a very important person in my life over the last 12+ years. I actually distinctly remember my first knowledge of Quillen’s existence. It was 13 summers ago, I was in that building right there, and Saasha told several of the other summer camp counselors that Heather was expecting. I barely knew Heather at the time, but during Quillen’s first year or two of life, I had the pleasure of becoming good friends with her parents. I remember the first time I visited their home and was disappointed that Quillen had already gone to bed, because as many of you remember, she was such an amazingly adorable baby and toddler, you couldn’t help but want to play with her! She had a way of wrapping everyone around her finger, and as a toddler had inadvertently convinced many people she was hearing impaired because didn’t talk much. All she had to do was walk up to any staff person, hold out her arms, and get picked up—she simply had no need to speak!
When she was 2 ½ she moved into the Lower West classroom where I was the assistant, and it was about this time that I began to notice in Quillen what I believe to be one of her most wonderful qualities—her amazing compassion for creatures more helpless than herself. We have a wonderful picture of Quillen as a small preschooler, sitting on the floor with both arms gently wrapped around our dog Celtic, who still loves her dearly to this day. It was when she was 5 or 6 that I realized how deep her compassion for animals was, when she told us she wanted to be a vegetarian because it made her so sad to eat animals—but that she was worried she couldn’t do it because she really liked hot dogs. Over the years, Quillen has nurtured dogs, mice, fish, hamsters and even children smaller than herself. Just last month, she spent a day with me at the Humane Society, playing with puppies and serving as my assistant photographer as I took pictures of adoptable dogs.
In the times like these that we’ve spent together over the years, I’ve noticed something else very remarkable about Quillen. She has always been very content with just hanging out and spending time with people. She wasn’t a kid who insisted that someone needed to constantly entertain her. That’s not to say we haven’t played a lot of games together over the years, but if we were just hanging out and talking over dinner or over cards with her parents, she was always content to just be with us. Even if what we were doing seemed excruciatingly boring to a child, she would generally stay with us until she got tired enough to put herself to bed. Quillen has always understood the importance of spending quality time with people you care about, which is why I think we’ve developed a bond over the years.
I’m very proud of the young lady Quillen has become. She has grown from being the daughter of my good friends to being my good friend. Congratulations, Quilley!
Since I was ridiculously nervous and trying hard not to read my script verbatim, I know I
missed a couple of sentences here and there, but hopefully I conveyed what I was attempting to! I think Quillen's a wonderful person and I'm proud to call her my friend! :)Chad was very supportive and told me I did a good job, even though I'm pretty sure he would have said that no matter how I did! I had to laugh, because he said his "internal clock" told him that I was almost starting to talk too long right when I started to wrap things up, so he felt like it ended up being the perfect length. However, I felt kind of bad because some of the guest speakers (many of whom were parents talking about their own children) talked forever (like 10-15 minutes), and while that was certainly entirely too long considering there were 17 kids in the class, it did make me feel a little bad that I hadn't used more of the opportunity to say glowing things about Quillen! I could have talked for far longer if I'd thought it was appropriate! She's a terrific kid!
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