I’ll never forget the day the Hipster putted into town. I can still see his maroon Vespa wheeling around the town square and pulling up outside The Grounds Floor Coffeehouse like it was earlier today. Matter of fact, it was earlier today. Black frame glasses beneath a sculpted bed-head, with an ITALY zipper jersey and retro Adidas: seems that’s what the girls around here go for. Female heads turned all over the Grounds Floor, or so the story goes.

See, I wasn’t there. I was next door minding the feed store. But everybody in town knows the tale by now. We’ve all heard about how Tom and Maureen Fleischenschwetzer’s girl, that Becky Fleischenschwetzer, sat down a few feet away from him and fired up her laptop. The Grounds Floor’s wi-fi was running a little slow that day, but Becky was never the kind of girl to give up too easy. She navigated to the Apple store and conspicuously browsed the iPods, hoping to catch the stranger’s eye. And so she did.

“Excuse me,” the Hipster said, looking up from his David Foster Wallace essay collection and pulling his earbuds out of his ears. “But you’re about to make a terrible mistake.”

Becky was shocked – had she blown it already? By shopping for an iPod, had she given herself away as a small-town rube? But then what was he listening to on those white earbuds? Had big-city folk invented some new kind of audio entertainment that wasn’t music or talking? She had so much to learn about the world.

The Hipster stood over her and gently guided her hand on the touchpad. Together, wordlessly, they found a peculiarly-named web site selling a peculiarly-named device called a Zune. Becky didn’t much care for the site’s ugly orange-and-green colors, or the long-winded, unfunny sales copy. But as she browsed the specs, she realized that the Zune was the player she needed. A 30GB hard drive, a 3” color screen bigger than the iPod Video’s, and $50-$100 cheaper than everywhere else.

As she reached for Tom Fleischenschwetzer’s Visa, she realized something: the Hipster’s hand was no longer on hers. He was gone. His caramocha latte, his DFW book, his shoulder bag: gone. She ran outside to find the Vespa nowhere in sight. Somehow, nobody’d seen him go. Nobody knew where he went. And Becky, well, she never got to thank him.

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