Acquainted with the Night by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2023-09-09T08:32:43+00:00

LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE, WITH RISKS

THAT PROVOCATIVE TITLE IS a line I often heard tossed out by a memorable, soft-voiced professor who gave a seminar called Problems in Poetic Theory, He said he was quoting Santayana. He would use it, raising his eyebrows and tilting his balding head to one side, with students who were nervous and hesitant about delivering oral papers, or who were afraid to follow the implications of literary or philosophical theories to their logical, bitter ends. He was an astute, generous teacher, beloved by the class; I profited from his abundant wisdom. Except that leaving his seminar the last day of the term, I tripped on the stairs and lost the heel of my shoe. Limping down the street, I collided with a fire hydrant, fell off the curb, and broke my ankle, which needed to be set and bound: I had to stay off my feet for a month.

Recently, alone in a restaurant downtown, rummaging in my purse for change to pay the check, I noticed that I had lost my eyebrow pencil because of a small hole in my make-up kit.

The loss of a lipstick or a Max Factor $2.99 compact would have meant nothing. These could be easily replaced in the Woolworth’s across the street. But the eyebrow pencil had a curious history.

Years ago, I used the familiar shiny red Maybelline eyebrow pencil, until one evening a friend who worked in an advertising agency told me my eyebrows were too dark. She said a soft gray drawing pencil would do better; moreover, she had an ample supply at work. Why not? I said, and so she brought me one, about six inches long. She was right. The drawing pencil did give a much gentler, toned-down line, especially when I learned to use it correctly, in short light strokes. I sharpened the pencil occasionally, but never to a very sharp point, for that would destroy the soft line it made. Because I used it so sparingly, the pencil lasted a long time. It lasted fifteen years, and the day I lost it, it was an inch-and-a-half stub, still serving me well.

It sounds odd to say I missed an eyebrow pencil, yet I did, for it brought back those lost days when I was a young girl and my friend was sketching underwear ads and I was working as a laboratory assistant examining the legs of fruit flies under a microscope. Much later, of course, we both rose in the world. She became a sculptor and I became a copyright lawyer.

Anyway, while I sat in the restaurant brooding over all this in front of my empty coffee cup, I began idly to listen to the conversation at the table next to mine. A young girl of seventeen or eighteen with billowy strawberry-blond hair and a gentle rosy face was talking animatedly to a young man with a dark beard. She told him the following story of lost and found, which touched me and made me smile.

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