"How are you today, ma'am?" I asked her, and she smiled up at me as only a graying, seventy-year-old lady can. "Just fine," came her reply, and so I started scanning her groceries. She only had a few, and I knew it wouldn't take me more than a minute. Then she would be gone, like all the others who had come before her. We would intersect each other, and then go off again, as much strangers to each other as ever. But before I started, she stopped me to ask a simple question.