In a diner, making for the coffee stand, I paused for an aged woman, as fragile as a shell. Our paths wove together in a stitchery of chance. She would have given way as rough custom demands: old age bows to youth, female to male, height and impatience trumping courtesy and care. "Thank you for noticing me," and her eyes glinted a little. "When you're my age you are invisible." In the counting world youth rises and whirls, broad strokes and flash springing off the feet. Old age lifts memory to its ear, a conch shell's far-off ocean calling faintly from within.

This makes me think of my grandmother toward the end of her days, hunched and so much smaller than her 6 foot frame of my youth. She’d always love when someone opened a door for her or let her sit. To be seen-that’s what we all want.
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