I saw someone today that I decided will be famous in some circles someday, small circles, unless she wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I say this, without a bit of sarcasm. We must all be aware that the voices of our national life that will turn up in small magazines, in poems, in novels of the future will be the product of the several generations of parents that were my contemporaries (though they are grandparents now) and by Generation X and the Millenials. Their experiences of life were different to some degree from us Boomers, but, of course, in many respects just the same. They have populated the planet with adolescents and teenagers who, in mind, soul, dress and demeanor, resemble this young woman. So I surmise — and imagine.
She is an individualists — though many young individualists seem to blend into a herd of expressive uniformity.
The young woman in question might be in high school — or she might have been in her late twenties. She had that universal ageless look about her. But — she had quite a look about her. Again –a solitary individual broken away from an army of individuals, and wearing the “uniform.”
She was checking the Large, Florida library screens seemingly in search of a book. Then I saw her wandering among the stacks in the second level — near the poetry and plays, but she might have been checking out the non-fiction areas, too. Or the theater.
She had clipped, short, blondish — blondish, almost boyish, seemingly natural — hair. She stood about five feet. She wore a gray top under a light gray hooded sweater — even on this Florida September day of typical humidity and heat. But — those who spend a great deal of time in library air conditioning might find their temperature dropping.
She was a study in blacks and grays.
She wore black high-top sneakers — and, in keeping with the expressive individually of our time that turns our bodies into tableaus, she had on one leg (and I did not notice this until my second glance) a thicket of black interlocking tattoos all the way up to the high-level top of her short. On the other leg, an equal tangle of vine-like tattoos only went up half way on her pale skin. Perhaps that leg is a work in progress.
She wore round glasses with clear rims. She had a bright orange sack slung over her shoulder. Her only dash of color.
She was, yes, a human study, and, I expect, rather studious in her own right.
She would soon blend back into the world external to the library, and not necessarily be easy to spot or single out for these enumerated physical attributes, for thought she caught my eye, she looks –as I’ve already said –like a major percentage of her generation looks these days — having made a conscious choice to express herself satorially and physically as an individual in that army of individuals.
Expressive Individualism! (Was it Robert Bellah who came up with that phrase?) Nothing all that unusual about trying to be unusual these days.
I will be left forever guessing –even should I chance to see her again and unless I make so bold as to approach and interview her, just what she thinks about life. I’d like to find out if such knowledge be obtained without offending her or rightly arrousing her suspicions or hostilities. (“Hi, I just think you’re interesting-looking and could I ask a few questions about, ah, your choice of dress or what’s on your mind….”)
Yeah, right. Someone call the cops.
But this future prospective Nobel Laureat or Poet Laureat or singer of ballads in New York or Amsterdam cafes– once she leaves home and becomes an ex-pat — this highly decorated, expressively individualistic soul nonethless is ( and do I repeat myself? Yes!) entirely typical of so many other late members of Generation Y, OR the ubiquitous members of Generaton Z. She just, as I’m saying here, caught my eye — and her understated, black and gray earth tones contrasted happily, to my eyes, with the splashy rainbow-colored conscientously eccentric types of her generation -like the “goth”s who must so deliberately put on a mask of primeval ugliness.Black on black.
And she seemed studious (as I said) and serene (perhaps I didn’t say that). I wonder what she keeps in that orange sack?
Let me say a very peternal thing: God go with her — to New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm — or just home to mom and dad and dinner tonight. And to her similarly decked-out bedroom. And to sleep.
May she find what has eluded so many who wished to make more than a ripple on life’s surface — including me.
Or, isn’t it far more likely she just wants to be alone? For, that was the other things about her — her solitude.
She is Young Miss Solitude. I like that, too. No jabbering of gossip, no noisy friends gathered around a table, challenging the library’s silence.
She was alone. A singular soul. On a September afternoon.
19 Cent Notebook 