Hwy. 141 & Medlock Bridge Road

             It’s February in Georgia and, for the season, an unnaturally beautiful day in the seventies. There’s a girl in traffic.  She’s driving a baby blue Volkswagen convertible with the top down like some flashback vision to 1977.  Her blonde hair is tied back in a loose ponytail that dances frantically in the wind while a few strands have worked loose and tickle the side of her smooth face.  She’s singing and moving to music that can’t be heard in the traffic around her. 

Surely this scene has played out a million times before in different settings and cities with different girls having played this role.  Countless times. 

 And, somehow, she is so much more.  She cannot be dismissed so casually.  She’s unique in her capture of life, unblemished and unbridled. She, in her total lack of inhibition, in her unrestrained joy at this prosaic yet singular moment, she becomes life’s effortless avatar. 

And if later tonight, she’s out with friends in perfect makeup and perfect jeans with perfect hair and that practiced nonchalance of youth, she’ll never surpass this- the moment when she achieved accidental and absolute beauty.

And she will never know.