I'm glad I read this again so many years later. I don't relate to Leo or Stargirl but they make sense to me. I disagree with those that say Stargirl is just Leo's manic pixie dream girl. She never felt one dimensional to me.
There's been a lingering feeling I can't explain since I finished it. I didn't read the sequel back then but I'm currently on it.
"An unusual girl," he said. "Could see that from the first. And her parents, as ordinary, in a nice way, as could be. How did this girl come to be? I used to ask myself. Sometimes I thought she should be teaching me. She seems to be in touch with something that the rest of us are missing." He looked at me. "Hm?"
I nodded.
He turned the mahogany bowl of his pipe upside down and rapped it with his knuckle. A small stream of ash spilled onto a thicket of dead mesquite.
He pointed the pipe stem at me. "You know, there's a place we all inhabit, but we don't much think about it, we're scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day."
"What's that?" I said.
"It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds, we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be."
"Though I think she had simpler things in mind. Star people are rare. You'll be lucky to meet another."
"Star people?" I said. "You're losing me here."
He chuckled. "That's okay. I lose myself. It's just my oddball way of accounting for someone I don't really understand any more than you do."
"So where do stars come in?"
He pointed the pipe stem. "The perfect question. In the beginning, that's where they come in. They supplied the ingredients that became us, the primordial elements. We are star stuff, yes?" He held up the skull of Barney, the Paleocene rodent. "Barney too, hm?"
I nodded, along for the ride.
"And I think every once in a while someone comes along who is a little more primitive that the rest of us, a little closer to our beginnings, a little more in touch with the stuff we're made of."
On this day he stated: "She's better than bones." On my previous visit, he had said, "When a Stargirl cries, she does not shed tears, but light." On other days in other years, he had called her "the rabbit in the hat" and "the recycler of our garbage."
He said these things with a sly grin, knowing they would confound me as I mulled them until our next meeting.
