The eyes are the first things you notice and the last things you see. They lock on to you with an intensity that almost burns, and they never drop, never avert their gaze. You know from the first that this isn't a typical encounter, a normal, casual conversation.
A freshman in a big university, she seems anxious to absorb the world, an intellectual sponge, a great, consuming fire of curiosity. She's also a bundle of contradictions, confident but nervous, outgoing but lonely, mature but homesick. Tempted to pull back to the small town from the big university world, she digs in and soldiers on, determined to make her way, to live her dream.
A natural communicator, she talks as fast as I do, making our conversation sound like the gunfight at the OK corral. There's never a break, not a pause as we pick up ideas mid sentence and continue running with them, like a basketball passed back and forth down the court. And she never tosses out a trite comment or an unconsidered idea.
Each new bit of knowledge is filtered through layers of analysis, categorized and filed away. It's easy to forget that she's still hardly more than a child.
She's an aspiring journalist in a world where journalism is undergoing drastic, perhaps catastrophic changes. While many would be reluctant to enter a field in such flux, she appears to revel in it, confident that she'll survive and perhaps prosper.
There is a tendency to be concerned for the young people starting out, a concern about the kind of world we've left for them to navigate. However, if she's any indication, we have nothing to worry about.
No comments:
Post a Comment