I wasn’t going to blog about this but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I was at a small function last night with 30 or 40 others, very informal affair, no schedule, no formalities.
Predictably everyone gravitates to their micro groups, including me, and will spend the majority of the evening conversing with one eighth of the attendees. Nothing new discovered, nothing really learned.
But there is a mentally handicapped boy in the crowd, about 14 years old who for the whole night, did not say a word, but just kept smiling like he knew something great that no one else did.
I couldn’t help but watch him as he moved from group to group. His movement gave his condition away but boy did he cover some ground. I never saw him sit down, I never saw him say anything. He just kept smiling.
I am eternally curious, but I never asked him why he was smiling. I didn’t even know how, like I would need to conjure some mystical way of communication to ask another human being a question.
I watched as he approached groups of four or five people, and how the groups of four or five people would become two or one, or less.
He kept smiling.
He walked over to a girl, late teens, who was by herself. She walked away from him to do, as it turned out, nothing. Just stood somewhere else.
And you know, he just kept smiling.
I wanted to tell him that if he had a beer in his hand and said ‘fuck’ more often, he would find it a lot easier to be accepted. Maybe even make a black joke or joke about having sex would help break the ice.
But I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t tell him anything. Like everyone else I was too uncomfortable to say hello.
He didn’t mind. Not at all. When he left, he randomly shook the hand of half a dozen people he hadn’t met, didn’t say a word, just smiled.
No one really cared. No one seemed to mind that the greatest thing in the world may have been walking out the door and to find that out, all someone needed to say was “Hi. Why are you smiling so much?”
Tags: amazing, missed opportunity, red trousers, redtrousers, smiling