9.15.15 Anything you want

It was so odd, and yet not a surprise, how at 15, if I asked him to run into a store to get directions, he'd come out with these little tiny bits of paper, with phone numbers on them. 

It began happening all the time, and he'd just look at me, shrug,and dump them into the car's console. 

     My family had this going on, this weird thing sent down through generations, where someone might not be beautiful according to the current criteria , but had some sort of cultural compulsion going on. They might not even be nice, or decent, but people would be inexplicably drawn. 

I knew a whole family I grew up with, that was like that. Yeah, tall and anglo, blonde even, but not beautiful. And yet, wherever any of them went, it was like some weird fairy not-nice-godmother cast a spell,and they were followed about like the Pied Piper. 
      Once we were at a wedding of friends, who'd been together for years, had three teenagers, a beautiful farm way up in the hill towns with all kinds of animals, Reggae music blasting, their whole thing, so kind of nice. Their daughter caught a look at him, and was on it. I was like "Why why does this happen? Is it a smell? The undeniable bad boy thing?" Because there was a big serious bad boy thing happening at the time. A no good one.I just scooted us right out of there, pronto.  
      And so it was, that he encountered this. The younger ones learned to ignore and disarm the whole thing, I watched them. I have no explanation for it.I didn't like it at all. I saw all my siblings struggle with it. Funny, because it's not blatant classism or racism, but something far more odd and peripheral.

     Until he fell in love finally and married, everywhere he went, women were handing him the little papers, essentially saying as they gazed at him "Anything you want. Anything."