Why, Hiya, Maja: Mither Awhile

Seems it’s eons I’ve let slip through my fingers turning my head and being swayed by sashaying skirts on the boulevard. Countless strained necks and whiplashes from a pair of eyelashes coasting before me in a divine dawdle. Oh, the time I’ve lost in wooing. Thomas Moore summed it up aptly:

“My only books

Were woman’s looks,

And folly’s all they’ve taught me.”

She’s got gall. She’s got guile. She’s all manner of Beastie Boy lyrics. Maja is a amitous aubade from the antipodes. Ostentatiously from Oz. Her enthusiasm all too apparent even via text message. It was clear from the get-go I was dealing with someone in possession of a mind wonderfully odd and uncharted.

We meet downtown and volunteer on Skid Row. We cobble together sandwiches and caravan on over for prompt distribution. And she carries a bindle of unassailable sunshine wherever we roamed on the Row. Smiles for miles and vigor in no short supply throughout the night.

Afterward we crank out Metro share bikes and have a pleasant peripatetic pedal around the desolate streets of Los Angeles. We carom by the Cathedral, pad around Pershing Square, and whizz adjacent to the Walt Disney Concert Hall making our way every which way through the circuitous avenues of a city under moonlight. Her hair a curly muss of cavalier. Her mismatched high-hued socks and combat boots. All painting a very charming and unconventional blur along the bike path lit by erratic streetlight but constant her-beam.

And I learn many a thing from my worldly and waywardly velocipedal companion. She is dizzyingly adept at impromptu nature-centric poetry slams. Epics that span time and space and existence and all-around why. She’s a vegetarian that will begrudgingly eat an entire raft of garlic fries whilst admonishing me for not partaking. Her gin rummy skills are exceptional. She also hitchhikes freely. And manages to remain undeterred from the inherent dangers of the ill-advised activity. There’s no wilting this larrupingly loquacious lass.

And punny. She’s so punny. She had no end of puns at her disposal. Which made the evening incrementally more playfully maddening.

Splayed before me are the contents of her bag. I ask her to arrange in any way she sees fit. To see if any additional insight can be gleaned from her subconscious via inspecting the way she positions a tube of chapstick or by measuring the thoughtful consideration in her composition of a wad of spent tissues.

No. She just dumps it all into a rick of riches. No conclusions to be plundered aside from the haughty way in which she manhandles her belongings. Her possessions are steeped in sand from the Venetian beach frolicking she indulged in earlier that day. And her Camelbak is deflated. As thorough frolictatation is thirsty work. On the heap a compact mirror. It looks untouched and neglected.

Fireworks from a distant Dodger game crash and rattle in the sky behind her. I point out the spectacle unwinding skyward. But she can’t be bothered. She’s too laser-focused on the next pun.

I like her, I learn ultimately. I like the way she smiles. I like the way she probably trampolines.

We part on the Expo Line at Seventh and Metro Station. I’m standing on the platform trying not to be too lacerated by those ferocious forget-me-not-eyes. She embraces me in earnest and clasps my skull in her hands like she’s a Predator and I’m a shoulder-laser blast away from being her next trophy. She bids me a fond adieu.

And what’s the lesson of lessons extrapolated from this whole ordeal? Again I quote the trenchantly perceptive Thomas Moore:

“Poor Wisdom’s chance

Against a glance

Is not as weak as ever.”

I begin to understand her carefree unconcern for fireworks. The source of the yawns. I suspect for years she’s been treated to majestic displays of color, warmth, and blithe jubilation. A firework spectacular every time she looked in a mirror.

So little compact in her bag: Continue to be grandly obsolete.