Stephanie Elana Honig, An Album Of Accomplishments Elita Sohmer Clayman

Stephanie Honig, an eighteen year old graduate from Pikesville High School epitomizes the quality most of us think about in our own children. She not only is an athlete, she excelled in her studies gaining a 4.0 average and she will be attending the University of Pennsylvania in August. She not only is a wonderful student and athlete, she is the supreme example of a fine young adult in a world of now; that you hear mainly about the not so good kids.

Stephanie is a very pretty young lady, she is also an artist and I have seen many of her paintings in the offices of her mom, a dermatologist in Pikesville, Dr. Barbara K. Honig and of her dad, an ophthalmologist in Pikesville, Dr. Marc Honig. Evan is her brother and he too excels in whatever he does

I like to write about encouraging everyone to accomplish anything they want regardless of their ‘now’ age. Well, Stephanie is accomplishing so much at the young age of only eighteen. She is a modest girl who has won many awards during her school years.

I like names and their meanings. My name Elita (which Mom made up in those long ago days of 1934) means “the chosen one.”   So I feel quite qualified to be chosen by myself to write about a young girl teenager approaching the time of being called a young lady. Stephanie means “crown” and Elana, her second name means “a tree.”  Stephanie surely is a crowning teen. Crown means pinnacle, zenith and tiara. She has in high school reached the zenith and pinnacle of what most teens strive for in their schooling.  In Field Hockey, as a junior and then as a senior, she was Varsity Team Captain. In Lacrosse and she was Varsity Team Captain as junior and a senior. In indoor track, she was Varsity Team Captain as a senior. The tiara she could wear would crown her an athlete/scholar.

She is indeed like a fine, blooming tree, blossoming out from childhood to teen years and her branches are all extensions of her fine attitude, intelligence, kindness, generosity, helpfulness and beauty.

She has been an artist since she was a toddler. She mainly likes to work with acrylics and pastels. She loves to paint landscapes, especially when she is at the beach. She took a few lessons when she was young at MICA, but really mostly just through school and her advanced placement art class at Pikesville High School. She has won multiple scholar-athlete awards and is very excited to be attending University of Pennsylvania. She has won the Dr.Ben Carson awards for many years for all her activities and scholarship. Her hope is to be a doctor in the steps of her parents.

There are many young graduates out there who do and will emulate the kind of girl Stephanie Elana Honig is and they can have her as a role model. To tell you the truth, I have never met her yet and hope someday to do so.However, all the words of praise I have heard come from other sources than her parents. They will elaborate on her attributes if I ask, but for the most part they are modest too, even though very proud of their firstborn child. You hear lots of news about perhaps the not so ‘good’ teens; it is nice to be a part of knowing an accomplished one.

All of us can be accomplished, good, kind and helpful, no matter what age we are now. I always stress in these one hundred and forty three articles I have written for Cockeysville Patch now renamed Hunt Valley-Cockeysville Patch; that it is never too late for any of us to attain anything we want to learn, do, try or see.

Mom was fifty-eight before she ever flew in an airplane. Her first trip after she was a widow was with a friend and they went to Spain. What a fine time she had flying and visiting several cities in Spain. Next she went on a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship and also a whole new world opened up for her. Next she went on a more difficult trip, time wise and walking a lot, to Israel. She did it and was so proud of herself because she and Dad had always talked about going there. I urged her to try it and she was taken care on the trip by the leaders, the Rabbi and his wife Herschel and Nechama Leibowitz. I am thankful she got to take these trips later in her life and her memories kept her going for many years, that she had the strength to undertake these tiring and long voyages.

I was thirty-eight before I went on my first airplane trip. I had been on long train ride trips, but never on a plane. We went on several trips, to Florida, California, and three cruises, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, England, France and Portugal. Also to Puerto Rico, Venezuela and many Carribean islands.  To travel as an adult, is wonderful at any age.

Now I write about ballroom dancing, life as a senior, and life as a teen similar to being a teen like Stephanie. However, Stephanie in her teen years has many benefits we did not have in the forties and fifties. However, she is the type of young girl/lady who would have achieved; accomplished and attained in whatever time she lived in. She is sophisticated, sweet and humble. She deserves all the accolades and awards she has received because she worked hard and long to merit them. They did not pop up and come to her. She came to them and in so doing, the county we live in and the state too, benefits from such a skilled and dear person

We all have albums with pictures, notes and certificates from worthwhile things we have done. I have fifty-eight trophies, medals and certificates for my ballroom dancing competition days from 1982- 1991.In those days, I was about forty-eight to fifty-one years old. It is still nice at even this senior age to look at them.

Stephanie Elana Honig already at age eighteen has what I call many albums of worthwhile accomplishments- Albums Of Her Mind. Her mind itself is an anthology and a treasury of the things she has already completed. She has fulfilled so much and now there is college, as is for so many of our young people and this is the time to wish them even more fulfillment in their future education and activities.

Emily Dickinson said “Love is anterior to life, initial of creation and the exponent of breath.” Stephanie, a lovely young teen on the brink of a new part of her life will surely realize even more important and happy times and reward the institution where she will go to college with her competency, availability to do charitable things and most of all her joy in living She will spread that to her new friends, professors and family.

We will miss her presence here in Baltimore County, but know the Pennsylvania area will be blessed with her residing there. There will be many more albums filled with pages of achievements, fun, happiness and scholarship. Bravo to teens like Stephanie and all those other teens who have achieved, accomplished, attained and are ready to do even more. Bless them all with good health and much joy.