Where you least expect it.

Do you ever go out into public spaces, and observe how people behave, and just come away feeling sad? Like when you see a six-year-old girl give another kid a lap-dance? On the one hand, you think about how far we've come since the bad old days, when it was considered scandalous for a grown woman to expose her knees; and on the other hand, you see this little kid grinding away and you think, "No, there's definitely a limit to how crass and vulgar we should let mainstream culture get".

I was lining up at the checkout the other day, and there was a middle-aged woman in front of me whose teenage daughter obviously had mental problems. The girl looked about sixteen, but when she spoke, she sounded like she had the intelligence of about an eight-year-old, and she had that drawl—or accent—or whatever you call it, that retarded people often have. Most people I've seen who are like that—even kids—tend to look slovenly and overweight, but this girl was neat, slim, and attractive. I'm guessing she was naturally ectomorphic, and on top of that, her mother probably put a lot of effort into keeping her tidy and presentable.

Anyway, as their groceries were going through the scanner, the girl asked if she could borrow her mother's mobile phone. Knowing my nibblings, I of course thought she wanted to play video games. Nope. Upon receiving the phone, she instead started to play generic sounding modern pop music, and dancing like a stripper.

At one point, I caught the mother's eye, and we both exchanged a kind of exasperated, "Well, what the fuck can you do about it?", look.

On the one hand, watching that girl dance made me sad. It made me think of the attention she was likely to attract in the future, and the fact that she probably wouldn't always have her mother around to watch over her. I thought about how, despite her mother's protection, the depravity of the big bad world had already touched her, as evidenced by the way she danced. And I thought about the worry and effort that her mother would pour into her, and the fact that her mother would still probably go to her death, wracked by the knowledge that there would be nobody there to take care of her little girl once she was gone. And on the other hand, I looked at that young girl, dancing through the checkout of the grocery store, without a single care in the world, and somewhere, deep down, a little piece of me felt happy.