HIGHLANDS RANCH -
You know that person in your life that everybody seems to know somehow? Polly Poindexter was that person to so many in the Rock Canyon community. Over the summer the high school lost their beloved registrar to cancer.
A poem was found at her desk. It’s called “Hands.” The school’s choir had it set to music. Over the holiday season the Rock Canyon’s Women's Select Choir has been using the song as a reminder to embrace opportunities to tell the people you love that you care.
Many women in the choir knew Polly since elementary school. Some even faked illnesses just to spend time with the former school nurse at Redstone Elementary. “Miss Polly wasn’t fooled for a second,” said the choir’s director Julia Dale. “When she came to work here, she was just the light of our lives.”
Polly was well known for fighting for the underdog at school. She was well acquainted with the role. “She had been told when she was in elementary school that there are two types of birds. There’s a singing bird and a listening bird, and that she was a listening bird,” Dale recounted to her class. “Isn’t that horrible?”
The song has been an emotional roller-coaster for the group. Dale addressed the class one morning in rehearsal. “Right now, I’m losing someone, and I’m reminded again, shoot - I didn’t tell this person how much they meant to me.”
“I have a lot of thank you’s I need to say to Miss Polly. Some of them I’ve said and I want to say again, and some of them I never said.”
“There’s someone in your life, hopefully still, who’s doing something for you that you need to say thank you to.”
After filling the room with tears, they filled Highlands Ranch’s St. Andrew Church with beautiful voices in December. Hands will be also be performed in January at the Colorado Music Educator’s Association Clinic/Conference at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs.
“Everybody’s going to say Polly Poindexter for hundreds of years!” Dale told her class. What would the class tell Polly? Rock Canyon Senior Jessica Reimers answered “I’d probably tell her... thank you for helping me grow up into... the person that I am now.”