Revelation by Will Stanton

“You cannot judge a book by its cover.”  This phrase itself is a hackneyed expression, yet its truth can be applied to many experiences in my life.  There certainly have been instances where, based upon surface appearances, I arbitrarily have assumed the quality or interpretation of a person or situation which, subsequently, proved to have been wrong or misleading.  Throughout my life, I also have tended to give people the benefit of the doubt unless subsequently proved otherwise.  I have assumed that people are more honest or reliable than they turn out to be, or more intelligent and better informed than they are.  Too often, I have been mislead by those people's own inflated egos, their self-assured behavior, or supposed credentials or positions of authority.  I end up being disappointed when they prove otherwise.  Those repeated revelations should have resulted in early learned lessons. 

Good looks can be very misleading, too.  Psychological studies have shown that tall, good looking people are assumed to be more intelligent, more capable, more successful, and generally happier.  I admit to having made that mistaken assumption, too.  We all are aware of any number of young, good-looking actors, for example, who became very popular and rich early on, only later to fall prey to some personal calamity such as a failed adult life of misery, an overdose on drugs or alcohol, dying in terrible car-crashes, or even committing suicide.

The most dramatic case that I'm personally familiar with is the tragic case of Ross Carlson whom I met on the Auraria campus.  Ross was especially handsome nineteen-year-old, very intelligent, and charismatic enough to have become a teacher's pet.  It was easy to wish to be  as fortunate as Ross.  It turned out, however, that Ross was suffering from multiple personality disorder.  He later shot both his parents and later died suddenly of acute leukemia.  I'm certainly glad that I was not Ross, despite his exceptionally good looks.   

I recall that, from a very early age, I was extraordinarily sensitive to beauty, and this certainly pertained to the human face and form.  I clearly recall the spring evening when I was only five years old when my brother and I joined a couple of young neighbor kids sitting on their lawn.  One boy, only a year older than I, was physically extraordinary in every way, with his finely formed face, his sensuous posture, and his graceful movements.  Looking at him, I was fascinated.  I actually felt an electric-like tingle in my stomach.  I never really got to know the boy as a person.  The family soon moved away, and I never saw him again.  So, all that I knew of him was his physical self, only the “cover of the book,” not the real “contents.”  Who knows what he really was like as a human being or what he may have turned out to be when he grew up.  His outer appearance may have not at all have reflected who he was or would be.

This hyper-sensitivity of mine to beauty most likely had some innate factor, yet I also recall a potential contributing learning-factor as well.  For some reason, I never quite felt accepted or loved as a young child.  This feeling was exacerbated by my hearing my mother saying, upon seeing one of my neighbor friends or classmates, “My, he's a good-looking boy.”  So, I suppose that I learned that, to be accepted, I had to be (quote) “a good-looking boy.”

Such a conviction and preoccupation crept even into some of my dreams.  Throughout the years starting in my late twenties and thirties, I sometimes dreamed of having the appearance I would like to have, of being years younger, sometimes perhaps back in college.  If I felt that, at a dream-age of twenty-four, I was out of place with the younger students, I'd wake up reminded of the fact that I was not even twenty four; I actually was was in my thirties.  Perhaps more interestingly, I often dreamed of being someone else entirely, younger, healthy, athletic, and good looking, sometimes even of a different nationality.  Youth, health, and beautiful outer appearance always have caught my attention.

But, outer appearances never tell the whole story.  In one extraordinarily curious dream, I saw myself as around sixteen to eighteen, not particularly tall but lean and compact, very good looking, and with dark-brown hair.  The peculiar aspect of the dream, considering that I was in rural Ohio, was that I was trying to appear to be attractive by dressing as a mock-cowboy.  In addition to  bluejeans, cowboy boots, and black cowboy hat, I also was wearing a linen shirt with an embroidered cowboy design.  In the dream, I had the distinct emotional feeling that I had dressed in this manner in an attempt to appear attractive in a young-masculine way.  That dream was so vivid and so peculiar that I remembered every moment of it.

Some years later when I was around forty, I traveled back to my hometown to visit my family.  They decided to take a long drive out into the countryside to a state park where there was a scenic hollow with a path leading to a waterfall.  The highway ran through an economically depressed area with a few tiny, neglected villages and miles of scrub forest and abandoned coal mines.  The people around there were very poor.  We arrived at the small, empty parking lot by the entrance to the hollow and gathered ourselves together to begin our nature-walk.

About this time, a worn, older-model car pulled in.  As the lone driver got out of his car, I cast a glance at him and was very startled by what I saw.  The image presented to me was so uncanny that I immediately developed a powerful feeling of déja vue.  I had seen him before, but only in my dream some years before.  The lone figure was a youth, at most around eighteen, good looking, and with brown hair.  But, what truly stunned me was what he was wearing.  He had attempted, here in the middle of nowhere in rural Ohio, to make himself look attractive by dressing as a cowboy with bluejeans, cowboy boots, black cowboy hat, and, most especially, a linen shirt with an embroidered cowboy design.  What were the chances of encountering a perfect match to what I had dreamed years before?   I was amazed.

Then, I felt something rather disturbing.  Everything about this youth and his old car with the local license plate spoke of rural poverty.  Even more poignantly, I sensed in this lone boy a life most likely of isolation in these poverty-stricken hills, quite possibly with a dismal future of educational and economic disadvantage.  Because of this strange, unexplained coincidence with my dream, I would have liked to have spoken to him, to find out who he really was as a person, to discover why he was dressed like that.  Of course, I felt that I could not do so.  I was with my family, and they would not understand or approve of my talking to this stranger.

Then reality set in.  Here was a very attractive person whom I would like to look like, that, in fact, I even had dreamed about, a mystery without an explanation.  Yet, that handsome appearance was only his outer image, the “cover of the book.”  If, by some magic, I had been  transformed into that person, I might also have ended up in a life of sadness, disappointment, and hopelessness, trapped in those depressed hills of rural Ohio.

That experience left me with two deeply ingrained impressions.  Ever since that day, I have been puzzled by the unexplained memory of encountering the same attractive person,  uncannily dressed in cowboy clothes, as I had seen in my earlier dream.  The other was the  reminder to avoid envying those individuals who appear to be especially attractive, for the lives of those individuals may not be so attractive as their outside promise.  You cannot judge a book by its cover.    

© 2 January 2014  

About the Author 

I have had a life-long fascination with people and their life stories.  I also realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual ones.  Since I joined this Story Time group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group.  I do put some thought and effort into my stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.