Stranger-Face
Once many years ago, I went to the airport to pick up a man who I loved and who I believed I would be with for a very long time. I stood shoulder to shoulder with thirty or forty others like me, all of us watching the gate for some departed friend, lover, colleague, or relative to emerge.
My sweetheart and I had been apart for a few months and I was shamelessly eager to see him again. I am 35 years old. Today, I bat my eyelashes and a week goes by. I hear this only gets worse in your forties and fifties, and that by your sixties, you can blink away entire decades. But when you’re only 20, and I was at the time, three months is an eternity. A whole summer. A life could really change in three months.
So there I stood waiting at the airport, antsy, hair fixed, lipstick applied, reapplied, and carefully blotted in anticipation of our reunion. My eyes darted from one man to the next and I was just about to interrogate the airline attendant as to whether my beloved had actually boarded the plane when this stranger came to a standstill right in front of me. Somewhere in my subconscious, I had registered this guy eyeing me when he got off the plane but I didn’t pay too much attention because I was searching for my love. And now, not only could I not find him, but this goofy guy was standing right in front me. He held a tired bouquet of flowers and he stared at me with an ardent grin.
Oh.
God.
It was him. My absent love. I stared at him for an awkward couple of nanoseconds, then we embraced, and then we went on. It might seem absurd, but for those tiny fractions of time, I did not recognize him. That was very disturbing to me for a while. But by the end of the night, we had caught up to each other and slowly, little by little, his face had begun to morph back into the comfortable shape I had assigned to it.
Since then, I have been hyper-aware of this phenomenon. I call it stranger-face. I’ve talked to friends about it and it seems to be universal. The theory goes something like this: When you don’t know someone, they have stranger-face, they look like, well strangers. They appear to you as they physically look. No less, no more. They assume the comprehensive physicality of their characteristics: height, weight, build, eye color, hair color, the rise of their cheekbones, the fullness of their lips, the angle of their nose, the strength of their chin. You see them as they look with no emotional input. Clean slate.
After you get to know someone, you see them differently, for better or worse. Even after five minutes. For the sake of argument, I’ll concede the obvious and admit that yes, when you adore someone, they do get better looking. Flaws become features, moles wax endearing, and scars disappear. But that’s not really my point. My point is about familiarity and how we choose, if only subliminally, to see someone through a filter of our affection as opposed to in a purely corporeal sense.
Perhaps it’s easiest, most obvious, to explain in terms of mothers and their children. I have seen my mother-in-law look at both of her sons with such sweet, genuine adoration. Her boys are 38 and 40 but I wonder if it’s not impossible for her to see them as they really are now. At my son’s second birthday party, I talked to my mother-in-law about how quickly my brand new baby was disappearing, at how fast he was growing up. We covered one cliché after another.
“He’s already two. He’s walking. Look at him. He’s SO big!” I gushed. "When do you stop seeing them as little babies?” I asked her. She looked right into me and answered me very seriously.
“You don’t.”
Oh. No, I guess you don’t. It may be impossible to see your kids in stranger-face, at least on purpose. You’re far too emotionally involved. You can catch a glimpse by accident, of course. I recently saw my son Elias, now three and a half years old, in stranger-face. He had just moved up to the big-boy class at his school. That’s the pre-school class. These kids are four and five years old. They go to the bathroom by themselves, clean up their own messes, sit in organized little circles for story-time. It might sound normal to you, but it blows my mind. They have a computer in their class even.
The first time I picked him up from the new classroom, I scanned the room and couldn’t find him. I thought briefly that I was in the wrong classroom. These kids were way too big. And just as I was about to leave, I saw this beautiful, giant red-headed kid typing at the computer, and it hit me.
“Holy crap, that’s my little boy.” I know, I know. I am a walking cliché. But what can I do?
The parent-child relationship is the exception to the rule, though, in my opinion, at least as far as being able to actually invoke stranger-face. Everyone else is fair game. When I meet someone for the first time now, I always try to memorize their stranger-face. In fact, there’s a bizarre art to removing yourself from what you know about a person, from how you feel about a person, and then just trying to see them, to simply recognize their carnality.
With a little effort, you can train your eyes to see beyond your mind and then observe your loved ones from a stranger’s perspective. It’s something worth seeing.
My sweetheart and I had been apart for a few months and I was shamelessly eager to see him again. I am 35 years old. Today, I bat my eyelashes and a week goes by. I hear this only gets worse in your forties and fifties, and that by your sixties, you can blink away entire decades. But when you’re only 20, and I was at the time, three months is an eternity. A whole summer. A life could really change in three months.
So there I stood waiting at the airport, antsy, hair fixed, lipstick applied, reapplied, and carefully blotted in anticipation of our reunion. My eyes darted from one man to the next and I was just about to interrogate the airline attendant as to whether my beloved had actually boarded the plane when this stranger came to a standstill right in front of me. Somewhere in my subconscious, I had registered this guy eyeing me when he got off the plane but I didn’t pay too much attention because I was searching for my love. And now, not only could I not find him, but this goofy guy was standing right in front me. He held a tired bouquet of flowers and he stared at me with an ardent grin.
Oh.
God.
It was him. My absent love. I stared at him for an awkward couple of nanoseconds, then we embraced, and then we went on. It might seem absurd, but for those tiny fractions of time, I did not recognize him. That was very disturbing to me for a while. But by the end of the night, we had caught up to each other and slowly, little by little, his face had begun to morph back into the comfortable shape I had assigned to it.
Since then, I have been hyper-aware of this phenomenon. I call it stranger-face. I’ve talked to friends about it and it seems to be universal. The theory goes something like this: When you don’t know someone, they have stranger-face, they look like, well strangers. They appear to you as they physically look. No less, no more. They assume the comprehensive physicality of their characteristics: height, weight, build, eye color, hair color, the rise of their cheekbones, the fullness of their lips, the angle of their nose, the strength of their chin. You see them as they look with no emotional input. Clean slate.
After you get to know someone, you see them differently, for better or worse. Even after five minutes. For the sake of argument, I’ll concede the obvious and admit that yes, when you adore someone, they do get better looking. Flaws become features, moles wax endearing, and scars disappear. But that’s not really my point. My point is about familiarity and how we choose, if only subliminally, to see someone through a filter of our affection as opposed to in a purely corporeal sense.
Perhaps it’s easiest, most obvious, to explain in terms of mothers and their children. I have seen my mother-in-law look at both of her sons with such sweet, genuine adoration. Her boys are 38 and 40 but I wonder if it’s not impossible for her to see them as they really are now. At my son’s second birthday party, I talked to my mother-in-law about how quickly my brand new baby was disappearing, at how fast he was growing up. We covered one cliché after another.
“He’s already two. He’s walking. Look at him. He’s SO big!” I gushed. "When do you stop seeing them as little babies?” I asked her. She looked right into me and answered me very seriously.
“You don’t.”
Oh. No, I guess you don’t. It may be impossible to see your kids in stranger-face, at least on purpose. You’re far too emotionally involved. You can catch a glimpse by accident, of course. I recently saw my son Elias, now three and a half years old, in stranger-face. He had just moved up to the big-boy class at his school. That’s the pre-school class. These kids are four and five years old. They go to the bathroom by themselves, clean up their own messes, sit in organized little circles for story-time. It might sound normal to you, but it blows my mind. They have a computer in their class even.
The first time I picked him up from the new classroom, I scanned the room and couldn’t find him. I thought briefly that I was in the wrong classroom. These kids were way too big. And just as I was about to leave, I saw this beautiful, giant red-headed kid typing at the computer, and it hit me.
“Holy crap, that’s my little boy.” I know, I know. I am a walking cliché. But what can I do?
The parent-child relationship is the exception to the rule, though, in my opinion, at least as far as being able to actually invoke stranger-face. Everyone else is fair game. When I meet someone for the first time now, I always try to memorize their stranger-face. In fact, there’s a bizarre art to removing yourself from what you know about a person, from how you feel about a person, and then just trying to see them, to simply recognize their carnality.
With a little effort, you can train your eyes to see beyond your mind and then observe your loved ones from a stranger’s perspective. It’s something worth seeing.
Comments
I'm glad to know I am not the only one who does this, because for the longest time I thought it was just my forgetful brain!