How old is the girl from Ipanema? Is she still a girl?
She’s probably married several of her children and has osteoporosis,
Another myth broken, just like that mysterious girl Steve McCurry Shot in
Afghanistan,
With savage gray eyes, only to track her down later behind a blue burqua’a,
Requiring a husband’s permission to unveil and present herself to a camera
she once made love to,
Only later did we know that her name was “Sharbat Gula”, “sweetwater
flower girl”,
In our minds, just like Dave Brubeck Quartet, she was forever “taking five”,
On a hiatus from real life and its worries, with a defiant, almost insolent at-
titude,
But now we know that she does her laundry at the river, just like all the other
women from her village,
Like the Preservation Hall Jazz Band members, she was that number when
the saints came marching in, when liberators came and freed her land,
Free from what exactly no one knows,
But she still wore the burqua’a and still needed here husband’s permission to
take it off the camera, now that she was a free woman,
Free from what exactly no one knows,
And when summertime comes, and the living is still not easy,
Somewhere round ‘bout midnight, plays Stephane Grapelli’s “Solitude”,
Does Sharbat ever hear it? As much as the grandmother from Ipanema does,
I believe.