Beautiful

Yesterday morning I was walking into breakfast here at the Staybridge when I just about bumped into an elderly Arabic man of uncertain nationality who was walking around with a little girl that I assume was his granddaughter. He smiles at me quite brilliantly and asks, "are you Saudi?" Now, I was just wearing a blue button-down shirt, jeans and sandals, so I didn't necessarily look the part. I was so taken back (and it rather difficult to silence me completely) that I just smiled back. He then said, "you are beautiful," before walking off happily with the little girl. Not since I was flying out of Mumbai and an Indian stewardess stopped me as I was boarding to plane to tell me that I was "so very handsome" have I been so certain that I had entered another dimension. Or it could just be a case where my hearing is even worse than I think. Who knows what he actually said or what he actually meant to say. Maybe the best answer is the one my great friend Andy proposed - that he actually said, "you are juvenile." My perceptive, and obviously kind, friend Cinse said that maybe he just saw some essential goodness in my nature and was recognizing that. I like that answer, although whenever I think of someone seeing the true me I imagine it ending up like the devils in the coffee shop complaining about Frank Black seeing their true essence in the "Somehow Satan Got Behind Me" episode of Millennium.