beyond a solecism: made to look

Recently, I did something I'm ashamed of. I took a picture of someone who didn't know I was taking his picture. He was sleeping, though, and I didn't have the heart to wake him up to ask him.

I don't think I have seen someone who so obviously was so particular about how he looked in a long time. I mean, I know people who care about their dress and appearance...but this fellow was so meticulous, so exacting in his standards. I wondered if he was extremely insecure or just very confident. Probably a mixture of both, like most of the rest of us.

My eyes probably widened when I saw him. I had just sat down on the bus.

I noticed his hat first. It was the little feather, sticking jauntily just so, that grabbed my attention. Then I looked at the rest of his hat. It was perfectly clean -- no little bits of anything stuck to it. (With hats like that, it's hard to do. Trust me, I know.)

Then I looked at his face. (I had just seen pictures of the Facial Hair competition [I did not know there was such a thing] --  some of these are pretty outrageous.)

This picture doesn't do it justice...I was very impressed by his facial grooming. His beard was perfectly pointy. Perfectly. Perfectly enough that I imagined the chin it was hiding was classic storybook villain pointy, as well. His moustache blended in so well it was scary.

His nearly full length wool pea coat fit him as if it were made for him. He had a leather briefcase (black) that was on his lap, and a large umbrella with a wood handle (it was a knob, not a cane-head shape) was between his knees. His entire person was so very well put together, I wondered how long it had taken him to get out the door that morning...if he did it every day, or if this was the Wednesday Special.

We got off at the same stop. I walked behind him. He had on black leather half boots with silver zippers with pointy toes that clicked when he walked. As I walked behind him, I imagined that the silver was a sticking point with him, but that he had been looking for the perfect boots so long he decided he would accept this quibble and just move on. His step was measured. He walked resolutely, but carefully, as if he were wanting to get to the his destination, but wanted to not disrupt anything about his appearance or seemed rushed.

His hair, which was almost to the bottom of his shoulder blades, was trimmed neatly. The only thing that anybody could argue threw off his look at all was that his hair was not perfectly straight in the back -- it looked like it had some wave, but only in the last four inches or so. It was like he had partially braided it the day before and then didn't realize there were still braid marks in it today. (Not that I've ever had this phenomenon happen to me...)