It took me a drive to Jacksonville at 1:30 AM to understand beauty. I drove to what once was a high school, my high school, where I really grew up. It was ugly then, by all accounts. Wires protruded from walls, the stucco was salmon, and the radiators sounded as though a thousand little men with hammers were stuck inside and trying to get the students' attention. It was bought, a few years back, by some company that wanted to turn it into a quaint office building. So out moved the children and teachers, out flew the cheesy decorations and lockers and desks, out out out flew that salmon stucco. They repainted, they stripped away the practicalities that shouted high school--worn metal bars in the middle of the stairs, grated windows, oft-repaired drywall, the old boiler--and now it would seem to be a beautiful place. The old brick exposed and complemented by well-placed lights and a more reasonable paint color, it looked very much like someone else's childhood memories, perhaps a place they visited on a sunny day when they were seven and picked up leaves with their mother and they were truly happy. It was funny, though, as I looked at this new antique building, with all its refinement and delicacy, that I was stricken with a deep and abiding sadness. It was as though my childhood dog had died and been replaced with a newer, faster, more practical dog. I realized, then, that this was the ugliest place I had ever seen; because while it may have improved in every way measurable, it lost its story, it lost the ghosts that happily followed the souls within it. That's not the wall I sat on at lunch anymore, it's the divider where a worker tied his shoes before the first day of work. All this crammed into my head as I crawled by, ogling the impeccable cleanliness and remarkable restoration, and I realized that beauty isn't in the eye of any beholder, it's in the sweetness of a memory and the nuances of an oft-spun tale. Beauty is a word that we should only give to something, someone, whose story we can tell and smile, or who stands above their sordid past as a rugged survivor of a private war. That's why I hate model houses and Playboy Magazine. People drive by model houses the way they flip through Playboy, driving by and looking at what is for someone but will never be for them, those pornographic houses standing bare on well-groomed tufts of greenest grass, plying their wares for each staring John. These houses, these women, these cars and diamonds are pretty, sure, but there's infinitely more beauty in an old childhood home, the Astro van that barely runs, your grandpa's watch, the woman who stood by your dusty side when the roads got a little too rough. That's why one's mom is probably the most beautiful woman they know, or at least should be regarded as such. Maybe no one else would put them in Maxim, but to those of us who no them as the women who wiped our noses and dried our tears, they are the picture of feminine perfection, the most beautiful of God's creatures. Beauty isn't in the eyes that catch ours, or in the skin that grazes ours, or even in the lips that press against our own, but in the sights our eyes have seen together, in the wind that's blown against both our skins, and in the softly spoken words that have escaped our trembling lips. That's beauty.
