Perfect

January 2005. Amended April 2025

I first caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye. It was the color of his skin that drew me to look at him. Copper, not quite as bright as a recently minted penny, but just as shiny.

He stood on line waiting patiently to use the restroom in an Arco convenience store in Gardano, Arizona. I knew that I would be embarrassed if he caught me staring at him, but I couldn’t turn away. He was a compact, wiry man with a chiseled face, a square jaw, high cheek bones, a narrow, pointed nose and black eyes set deeply into his face. I guessed his age to be about 75, but he could easily have been 60 or 85.

White hair draped down the back of his neck from under a blocked cowboy hat. His clothes suggested that he was on his way to some place special. A crisp starched white shirt with red trim, black bolo tie fastened with a silver clip and tan pants, newly creased  without a wrinkle. His pants were hemmed at mid-ankle revealing highly polished boots. A leather belt joined together by a large oval brass buckle completed his outfit.

I forced myself to look away before he saw me. I could not remember what I wanted to buy so I settled on a Diet Coke and walked back to my car.

As I thought about him, I remembered an incident I read about long ago. A New York State Trooper pulled over one of the Hemingway girls for speeding on an upstate parkway. Once he had her license and registration, he returned to his cruiser, wrote out the ticket and gave it to her without saying a word. When asked why he hadn’t talked to her, he replied, “I couldn’t, her perfect beauty overwhelmed me.”

Now I understood how he felt.