This 1879 painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau ~ "Young Gypsies" ~ reminds me of a single moment, maybe ten minutes all told, in the 1960s, when I saw a young woman just my age (I was 22 on this particular day) and her baby at a gathering in Eastwoods Park along Waller Creek in Austin.
I'll call her Sylvania Manderly. I did not know her, but it was rumored that she would not marry the father of her baby, that he had left her because she would not marry him, and that she and her baby were quite alone in the world. And furthermore, she was said to be a poet.
Beyond these little bits and pieces, I knew nothing more about her at all, nor even if what I "knew" was true.
We were a curious group of young people gathered together that day: a handful of graduate students (I had just started working toward a Master's in Creative Writing) and a handful of young men who had just returned from their tour of duty in Vietnam. We were strangers who had come together because of a flyer thumbtacked to a bulletin board in some university hallway, a flyer with its own rumors of a war I barely knew was happening on the other side of the world. And one of the graduate students had grown his hair out as long as mine.
Sylvania had her baby nestled against her front in a make-shift sling (this was a very "new" way of carrying a baby back then). She was a tall gypsy-like girl with a cloud of dark hair, in a wisp of a dress, and barefoot. She wandered away from the group, slowly following a little footpath along Waller Creek.
I watched her and her baby disappear from view. I never saw them again.
She had set herself, barefoot, upon a path of her very own making. I saw her breaking away from the group as if she were the moon breaking away from her orbit around the mother earth. I had never before heard of a woman choosing to raise her child out of wedlock.
I had never before met young men just returned from combat. And I had only recently begun to see young men with long hair ~ were they trying to look like Shakespeare, I remember wondering.
Perhaps Sylvania and her baby and those young men just back from war and that long-haired graduate student were some kind of tipping point for my trying to set my own feet upon my own path. I wonder how often some chance encounter with strangers never to be seen again, some single chance sighting of an ordinary event, a mother with child walking alongside a creek, influences the whole direction of our lives.
* * *
A few years ago I saw an article in our local newspaper about something or other in which mention was made of a "Sylvania Manderly, Poetess" and that she lives now in one of those little crossroads-towns that lie all around the outside perimeter of Austin, olden towns with one little town square from which a few rays of streets wander off and disappear into the countryside.
And how I smiled to think that she was still alive and still a poet!
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