For a long time I used friday as a freewrite and I focused on a word of the day from Merriam-Webster. Today that word is Winsome (generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence) and the write will be about that word…
I think each of us have what I would call a ‘True age’. Mine is probably mid thirties. Perhaps even as late as 38, though I’ve only seen 27 thus far. I feel like the mid thirties is when we are past the idea of settling down and into the reality of the thing, spending our hours with family and raising kids in the image of what we thought we could be and not what we ended up becoming.
When I met Sandra I thought her true age might hover somewhere around fourteen. I was off by a few years, and not in the direction I’d initially hoped. We met at a bar far from the glitz and roar of the college strip. I’d been coming there for nearly half a decade already–since I’d first decided to drink and quickly realized that I didn’t want to drink with other college students. She was one of those college students. She had long red hair that curled at the ends and wore a green dress that made her seem more like mannequin than girl. She looked perfect. She looked innocent and beautiful and just the kind of magical I’d always thought couldn’t be quite real. I must’ve been a little tipsy because I said, “I thought redheads only wore green in movies and on TV.”
She’d been about to ask the bartender for something but she stopped, mouth open, and looked right at me. Then she squinted slightly and wrinkled her nose, a look I quickly came to know as her trademark ‘what the hell?’ face. She said, “Don’t be an asshole. It makes you look uglier than you already are.”
Everyone in earshot broke down in laughter. Everyone but me, of course. Now I was the one open mouthed and surprised.