Encountering a Mona Lisa.

I was in a Tesco store today when I caught sight of a woman approaching me from behind. I turned to look at her and saw that she was young, maybe twenty or so, and eminently noticeable. She had long hair and long legs which climbed and climbed all the way to some mercifully indeterminate place a very short distance above a very short skirt. And she was blonde.

She was pretty, too, as I discovered when I shifted my gaze to her face (actually it was her face I looked at first, but it’s fun to be thought disreputable occasionally.) And there I saw something remarkable.

She was looking back at me and smiling in a way that was vaguely familiar from a time now past and shrouded in the mist of a near-forgotten history. It was a self-satisfied smile, a smug smile, the sort of smile which says ‘Yes, I am nothing if not spectacular. So glad you noticed.’

Women smile at me often these days, but never like that. It was the sort of smile that young women generally bestow on young men whose approbation is to be expected and appreciated, even though further attention is not necessarily sought. And it is, of necessity, reserved for young men because they are still players in the multi-faceted game and therefore appropriate recipients. I know what I’m talking about here. I learned to read the clues quickly from the age of around eleven, and I know that I am no longer an appropriate recipient.

And then she turned to walk through a door, presumably en route to the bowels of the building somewhere. As she did so I couldn’t resist stealing another glance, and do you know what she did? She turned and smiled at me the same way again.

I have to be brutally honest now and admit that at no time was there any hint of lasciviousness in my reaction. Much as it is fun to be seen as disreputable occasionally, lasciviousness has never been one of my characteristics.

So how did I react to the smile? Well, I found it confusing, amusing, intriguing and frustrating. And what did the smile actually mean? I have no idea. But isn’t it pleasing when such a small and ephemeral piece of enigmatic magic floats out of the eyes of a complete stranger in a busy grocery store on a Monday afternoon? At my age I think I can be satisfied with that.