Crowdsourced Beauty at the T.J. Maxx (Lunch Hour)

a perfect stranger rescued by a minor crowd

“Crowdsourced Beauty,” Beth Kephart, Monotype

At the T.J. Maxx, I watch as a woman of some age cants against her red cart and waits for the check-out line to move. Waits.

Were there a chair I would bring her a chair. Were there a bench I would lead her to it. But there is only the line, the wait, the cart—the shopper’s legs and back growing visibly more weary in the stuckness of the hour.

I imagine no cure. Lean into my own thoughts. Emerge a moment later to the buoyancy of voices that have come to the shopper’s aide. Perfect strangers asking to see the summer blouses this shopper has chosen, helping her lift them from the tangle in her cart, holding them out loose and straight on the shoulders of their plastic hangers. How the pink of that rayon will bring out the color in your face, they say. How the gray-green might want a gold necklace as complement. How the June sales are the best time to buy new summer blouses, are they not?

Now the shopper is straighter than she’d been. Now the crowd, not the cart, is her strength. Now she is beautiful, ageless, her pallor amplified by pink in the estimation of the minor crowd, her gold necklace waiting at home for the gray-green blouse. Now I am nothing but an outsider to the cause of raising up a stranger in the T.J. Maxx check-out line while waiting to buy three pairs of socks for the bargain of $8.99—an outsider deeply, abashedly wishing for a more robust imagination.

*

Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, a hybrid work of history and the imagination, was released in April from Tursulowe Press.

I have written numerous books on the art of writing and of living a literary life. They can be found here.

Join me for a Cleaver master class, “Transcending the Tumult: Write Right Now,” July 27, registration here.

Come meet me and my much better half at the Artisan Market, July 18-20, at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, information here.

My mini-collages are now on sale at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, here.

I will be having a one-woman show of my framed prints at the Gryphon Cafe in Wayne, PA, between September 7 and October 4, here.

Join me for an in-person writing workshop in September, through Maine Media.