Seagulls won't help you find your way when sea girls will take you to your grave

[sovay]

Tonight on the bus from Davis Square I saw a girl who looked like a marble by Praxiteles—the leonine nose, the small, full mouth, the rounded chin—with bright fair hair under a baseball cap, thumb-scrolling through her phone with earbuds in. She was wearing a teal windbreaker and a T-shirt the color of brick dust. She looked very much like that art project that went around the internet a couple of years ago, with classical statues photo-dressed in contemporary clothes. I believe I could have non-creepily said, "Just so you know, you look like a fourth-century head of Aphrodite," but the distribution of other bus riders was such that I would have had to move past several people in order to get her attention at all, and I thought that might have been unnecessarily awkward. I got off the bus at my usual stop. I hope someone tells her. She was blue-eyed or grey-eyed, but definitely Aphrodite.

Comments

[ethelmay]

I often find myself assigning people centuries. I used to have a boss who was absolutely eighteenth-century, or possibly very early nineteenth: black hair, a little scrawny, odd but attractive face -- you could just imagine him in snuff-colored breeches and tailcoat, with a bit of lace (not a lot -- he wasn't the dandy type). One of my daughters is also eighteenth-century: it's very easy to imagine her with powdered hair contrasting with her dark eyebrows and eyes. (Though when she was about ten and had bobbed hair, she looked extremely 1920s.) A friend of mine is a medieval angel. My son when he was small was straight out of an Ernest Shepard drawing (especially in shorts and sandals).

[sovay]

I used to have a boss who was absolutely eighteenth-century, or possibly very early nineteenth: black hair, a little scrawny, odd but attractive face -- you could just imagine him in snuff-colored breeches and tailcoat, with a bit of lace (not a lot -- he wasn't the dandy type).

You describe people beautifully. I am now picturing him as a painted cameo. Thank you for the other sketches as well, one of which is a painting and another a statue.