Raremoments in life, we stand at the very top of the mountain. Looking all around in every direction from that lofty height, glorious beauty fills our eyes. The clouds look like a white ocean at our feet. Our hearts race. A light-headed feeling overtakes our senses from the thin air, the chill, the silence. We barely notice our shadows as pure golden sunlight, unfiltered by the clouds below, bathes our bodies like a halo. Even so, our skin turns to gooseflesh. Though exceptionally uncommon, these mountaintop moments do happen and—if we allow them to—overshadow the bulk of the time we exist down in the terrestrial valleys.
Sleeping, waking, showering, sipping our morning cup, eating, taking in the news, cleaning up after ourselves, commuting, working, pondering, planning, teaching, learning; these make up just a few items in the long list of daily mundane tasks we perform while living down on the surface of planet earth. Then, suddenly—and very rarely—utter astonishment coupled with the tiniest sliver of anxious exhilaration completely overtakes us when life suddenly flings us out of our prosaic workaday experience, hurtling us all the way to the mountain’s peak in a single rush. Our middles become a flock of butterflies, and our knees turn to water. We barely notice even the most important everyday item from the low valley below as the astounding beauty of that moment cuts to the front of the line of our priorities. Life transports us to the mountaintop in that single heartbeat when we first lay eyes on that one person, that one who God has made especially for us.
For Daisy Ruiz, she first found herself on the mountaintop at the tender age of twelve.
Kenneth Dixon—who went by Ken and never Kenny—and his two brothers joined their youth group. She learned Ken’s name just as soon as possible and later learned that his brothers went by Jon and Brad. So-called identical triplets, she had to admit she often had trouble telling Brad from Jon or Jon from Brad. However, she never once had any problem identifying Ken.
Something about the way Ken moved, or how he sounded when he spoke or laughed, or the way he smelled always differentiated Ken from his look-alike brothers. Even at fifteen, his arms and chest rippled with muscles beneath his preferred polo style shirts. As far as identical, at least in Daisy’s opinion, Ken looked much more handsome than either of his ordinary-looking brothers.
Her father led the youth group and hosted the high school class each week on Wednesday nights in their home. By the second week, Daisy had enveloped the inside cover of her science notebook with variations of “Daisy Dixon,” and she very, very much wanted to feel those muscular arms embracing her while those incredible eyes stared deeply into hers.
The problem, as Daisy saw it, was that Ken Dixon barely noticed her. He was so much older at fifteen, a Sophomore in High School already, and surely just viewed her as a little girl in middle school.
He acted like a perfect gentleman with her parents and mostly stayed quiet in the group. Fairness forced her to admit that Ken handed out this trademark introspective silence pretty equally. He didn’t really reserve his reticence for her exclusively. Occasionally, he did have an interesting way of filling in the silences with a baritone word here or there whenever one or the other of his brother’s paused while speaking. His brothers would do the same to him, so Daisy rightly assumed this syncopated synchronized speech pattern had something to do with them being triplets.
That first summer, the brothers went on a mission trip to Egypt and spent five whole weeks building a school. Daisy took that time to study. She read a lot and watched a lot of videos trying to get some ideas about how to get Ken to notice her. Brad or Jon—she was never exactly sure which—often included her in their discussions. As a rule, unless she spoke to him first, Ken never even spoke to her after she greeted the brothers at the door. In seven months, Ken never once initiated a conversation with her.
Knowing Ken would return to Bible Study in her home just before school started, Daisy began to pray. She prayed that God would give her some inspiration, like He had Ruth. If not, Daisy prayed that God would at least ease the ache she felt in her heart every single time Ken failed to notice her new hairstyle, or her new dress, or her attempts at makeup.
School kicked off, and Daisy consulted with friends, never naming her crush, always trying to understand exactly how they got boys to notice them. Her mother caught her looking mopey and angsty, and Daisy nearly confessed the name of her heart’s desire, but she feared that her parents would keep them apart, so she kept it secret. However, she interrogated her mother about how she knew her father was “the one,” how she got him to notice her, and a thousand other questions.
At Christmas that year, though she nearly chickened out a hundred times, Daisy handed Ken a simple Christmas card right after the Cantata at their church. He stared at the card, puzzled, then said, “Oh. Thanks. You guys got the card Mom and Dad sent, right?”
“Yes. Yes, we did.” Daisy felt her smile falter just a little bit. His gray eyes had trapped hers, somehow, and she wanted to touch him, hold his hand, something. He just stood there looking down into her eyes, and she took a breath and bravely carried on. “I actually got this card for you. It’s from me.” After what she instinctively knew was a slightly too long pause, she concluded, “Ken.”
Oh, my, how she liked saying his name while he looked into her eyes. She longed for him to say her name, to hear it pronounced with that slight Atlanta southern drawl in that very baritone voice of his.
“Oh.” His eyes left hers to look down at the sealed envelope, and suddenly she could breathe again. “Okay, well, Merry Christmas. See you guys after the New Year.”
The brothers went on a two-month-long mission trip that summer, once more, leaving Daisy alone with her thoughts and hopes and dreams for the future. By the end of the summer, Daisy had convinced herself that the feelings she had for Ken Dixon amounted to little more than a young girl’s crush. Just puppy love.
She convinced herself with the unshakable certainty of every fourteen-year-old girl who has ever lived that the next time she laid eyes on Ken Dixon, her heart rate would stay steady, she would not feel dizzy, she would not feel tongue-tied, and she would have the ability to look away from him at will. He refused to even notice her? She wouldn’t even notice him. Ken Dixon was simply not worth her attention.
The first youth group meeting after the Dixon brothers returned from their mission trip, it just so happened that her mother was out of town looking in on a sick cousin. Daisy made sure she had things to do in the kitchen. That way, she didn’t even answer the door when they arrived. Her father happily greeted and seated all of their guests. The group had grown and split a time or two to keep the size manageable.
Just before youth group service began, Daisy carried in the last tray of snacks. She nearly dropped it when she saw Ken purposefully walking toward her with an elaborately wrapped gift in his hands.
He had grown at least another few inches. His skin looked evenly tan, making his teeth look whiter and his stubble look darker. She could swear he had more muscles on his shoulders, arms, and chest.
Daisy set the tray down, her heart beating against her ribs like a machine gun as Ken stepped closer. He stood right there in front of her on the mountaintop for a breath or two, smiling, looking her dead in the eye. She wanted that moment to last forever—just the two of them above the clouds with a beam of sunlight spotlighting them and them alone.
“Hey,” he greeted.
Her mouth went dry. She swallowed, hoping her voice sounded feminine and mature, not childish and tomboyish. Daisy no longer wore braces, and her teeth looked straight and white now. She remembered to smile before she spoke. “Ola, Ken.”
“So, the people in Honduras, they make these really incredible baskets. They make them out of all kinds of things like wicker, palm—heck—even pine needles. Anyway, they are really beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like them. So, anyway, here.” He handed her the elaborately wrapped box with the perfect bow on top.
Daisy’s mind, body, and soul froze as she accepted the gift. She dared not hope. She dared not speak. She just spun on the mountaintop like Julie Andrews spinning her way across the Alps, and her mind swayed to glorious music as her skin felt hot and chilled all at once.
“Can you get that to your mom when she gets back?” Ken explained.
Daisy tried her best not to let Ken see her heart explode. He might not have seen it, but she could not understand how he didn’t hear the thunderclap sound it made. “Sure.” She nodded, exercising incredible poise so as not to make her smile look somewhat creepy. “I’m sure she’ll love it, Ken.”
Her Freshman year, she finally attended the same school as the Dixon brothers. Ken and his brothers were the most popular seniors at their High School. At seventeen, the triplets had academically surpassed most of their peers and focused a lot of their attention on college-level classes like engineering and CAD. Ken stayed near the top of the honor roll and didn’t date very much.
The first time she passed him in the hall, he didn’t notice her at all. A few days later, she waved and said, “Hi, Ken.”
He turned his gaze toward her, somewhat startled, then knitted his brows as if trying to place her. When recognition dawned, it looked almost comical. “Daisy. Hey. I heard you were coming here this year. Cool.”
