I met a sprite

Friday night I met a sprite.  I was leaving the Goodwill outlet with my cartful of finds, when he looked up and said "Whoah, look what she found" to his female shopping companion, gesturing to my cart.

He came a little closer to inspect the large funky abstract painting in my cart.  He was small, delicate, with dirty blond hair and slightly pretty features like Ryan Philippe, set off with an interesting sort of nose ring.  He wore a t-shirt with a men's suit vest over it.  And around his bare neck he wore a black bow-tie, and under that a necklace of some kind of twisted hemp with a large crystal and a feather dangling from it.  On his head he wore a newsboy cap and on his hand fingerless gloves.

Oh, oh, oh, if only I could have taken a picture of him.  He was just... unique.  But I didn't have my camera.  And I probably would have been too shy to ask.

"You're not going to paint over that?" he asked me.  I felt sheepish, because I was planning to.  Yet even I could see its primitive abstract charm.  "That's the spirit of '69.  You can't paint over that."

Later, inspecting the canvas, I saw the signature, TES, along with the year, '69, and I knew what he meant.

"I might keep it this way for awhile - I'm not sure," I said - an honest answer.  He backed away to his own cart, but kept looking at me.  Looking at my painting.  "You can't paint over that," he said again.

I laughed and said "You're going to follow me out of here until I promise not to paint over it, aren't you?"  He laughed.  His friend, who was similarly artfully clad, started telling me about all the amazing art she'd found at the Goodwill Outlet, mumbling things I couldn't understand, including the words Gus Van Sant.  I nodded and said "Uh huh".

Then as I was leaving, my new friend came up to me and said "Here, you need a fairy," and handed me a cut-out fairy.

So I left the Goodwill outlet in the rainy night, my arms full of loot and one pink paper fairy to watch over me.

p.s. I haven't actually told you that in my city there are two Goodwill outlets - one purely dedicated to clothing that I already told you about and the other one is dedicated to everything else in the universe that is not clothing.  I visit them both, but this is a story for another day...