Francis Gay

The shop assistant couldn’t have been more than 20. I watched her talk to a much older woman who seemed to want to go on at length about...something

The older woman was nice, and perhaps lonely, but I struggled to follow what she was saying.

The shop assistant, however, turned the encounter into such a pleasure for everyone involved. The older woman left, not having bought anything, but having been seen and been appreciated. “You did that so well,” I said. “Before my granddad died,” she told me, “he had dementia. And it seemed like two years of my life were spent in the nursing home trying to understand and be nice to people who communicated in a different way from me, but still wanted all the same things I did.”

Wow! A tragic situation.

But one that grew some beauty to outlast it.