Interpretations.

I was in a discount store today and behind me in the checkout queue was a youngish couple accompanied by a girl of around ten or eleven, presumably their daughter. I soon noticed that she was staring at me, and so I glanced at her several times and every time I did she was still staring at me. I thought I’d try a smile to see what might happen. She smiled back and continued to stare at me, and when I’d finished my transaction at the checkout she was still staring at me.

And so I asked myself the obvious question: Why? Why would a young girl of that age be seemingly fixated on my physical presence, and the first answer I came up with was rather sad. It occurred to me that maybe she wanted a granddad and didn’t have one. It further occurred to me that maybe she’d had a granddad but he’d died and she missed him. (That sort of thought process is one to which I’m much given as a result of the sad stories my mother used to tell me as a child.) And then I felt like a complete piece of festering detritus at the recollection that I hadn’t waved to her when I left.

But then I had another thought. Maybe she was simply fascinated by just how ugly people become when they’re getting old. There, now; that’s much better and much more likely.

(I never had a granddad, you know. My mother never knew who her father was, and my father's father died of TB long before I was born. My step-father's father was a sort of surrogate, but it's not the same as somebody you've known since you were born. And he lived a long way away in London, so I only saw him a few times. He also gave my mother the gift of a gold swastika, and as I grew older I naturally wondered why he had it and where he'd picked it up.)