The pretty brown-haired girl across the way keeps looking at me and smiling.

Which is immediately suspicious, given the age difference between us and my ratty attire. My sweat pants are stained from helping move muddy roofing paper that had been left out a day too long. My shirt is all but ready for the rag pile, and the torso it covers is hardly the stuff to cause girls to swoon anymore. My hair is matted, where I still have enough left to mat, that is.

I’d understand if she was smirking, or had an otherwise condescending look of amusement on her face, but that’s not it. She’s actually sneaking glances at me and genuinely smiling, almost like my presence is elevating her sense of inner peace. Either that or it’s the wood-paneled wall behind me.

She’s got her hair pulled back in a shiny black band, allowing full view of a lightly freckled face. The smile reveals a slight overbite, which is charming in the way that only an imperfect feature can be. She’s really quite stunning, which only adds to my paranoia – wondering what odd parallel universe has enveloped me that this strange, beautiful girl would be looking at me this way.

I try to avoid looking back at her, but out of the corner of my eye I still see her intermittent glances. And I think, If only my own girlfriend would look at me that way.

After a while, I find it easier to ignore her gaze, as I go back to scribbling mundane lines in my blank book. The coffee in front of me is getting cold, but if I stop writing long enough to take a sip, I’ll look up and see her smile at me again. Then I’ll surely continue turning into the dirty old man this young woman’s attention has made me start to feel like.

Is 32 too young to be a dirty old man? Probably, but estimating her age at 17 or 18 has me confident that even thinking of flirting with her would put me on the wrong side of creepy.

And now shaking me from my neurotic thought pattern is a soft voice. I’m startled as I raise my head, because now she’s standing right in front of me. Her girlfriend is heading to the restroom. And she’s definitely smiling at me now.

She asks, “Do you remember me?”

“I’m sorry, no, uh, I don’t think so.” is my timid response.

“Because I’ve been thinking ever since I sat down over there that you look really familiar.”

“Oh…”

“At first I thought it was that you look a little like my father.” She stops her monologue just long enough for it to sink in that I might actually look old enough to be her father. Then she adds, “But then I realized why that was setting off bells in my head. And this probably sounds weird, but did you own a red flannel button-up shirt about fourteen years ago?”

It does sound weird. Even weirder is the fact that I clearly remember owning such a shirt. I puzzle back, half beneath my breath, “How did you… ?”

“Did any strange little girls ever try to hold your hand in a mall at Christmastime?”

I nod slowly. Suddenly I can fill in the blanks on my own. …

It was a week before Christmas, 1992. My girlfriend had arranged a ride home from college, but could only get as close to home as a shopping mall in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, 20 miles from the town where we both lived. I’d offered to meet her at the mall and bring her the rest of the way home. Against the backdrop of the usual holiday bustle, I waited just inside the mall entrance for her ride to pull up to the curb.

As I stood looking out the glass doors, I felt it.

A young child, no taller than hip-high, had just clutched my right hand. I looked down into the face of an anxious-looking little girl with reddish-brown hair and a slight overbite. She wasn’t looking up at me at first, but a couple seconds later when our eyes met, I could see a look of fear rushing onto her face. She began to sob.

I looked around. So many people were rushing by in all directions. I decided the best course to set was for the mall’s information booth. I gently coaxed the frightened child, whose grip had remained vice-like despite her alarm at finding herself attached to a total stranger, as we started in the direction of the booth, through a sea of shoppers. I found myself trying to reassure her as we walked. Amazingly, she started to calm, and her confidence in me seemed to grow incrementally as we plodded along.

We were about fifty feet or so from the information booth when I saw him. He stood out to me instantly. He was roughly my size, with approximately the same color hair. Like me, he was wearing blue Levis, brown Timberlands and, yes, even a red flannel shirt. He was facing away from us, oscillating in every direction but that of the mall entrance from which we approached. I knew then that he was searching for the little girl who had been doing a surprisingly good job of cutting off the circulation to my fingers.

“Excuse me…” I began to shout as we came within ten or fifteen feet of him.

As I did, thoughts flooded my head – like what he might initially think to see a stranger leading his daughter around by the hand. Then I thought of the chances, the probability that another man, wearing almost the same exact attire from head to toe, would happen upon his lost child. What were the odds of that? And what were the odds that it would be me, and not some child molester. I imagined, for just an instant, the horrific possibility that it could have all played out differently.

Then he turned to see us, and it was clear that none of this was on his mind at that instant. His expression went from worry to relief almost as quickly as the little girl’s had gone to sheer terror earlier. The girl finally released her grasp as he called out her name, and she ran into his arms, sobbing once again.

I’ve always been able to remember it like it was yesterday. …

“Allison?” I say to the girl in front of me, still half-mumbling, “from the Plymouth Meeting Mall?”

She smiles again, “so you do remember me.”

“Yes.”

She steps just a little closer to the table.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” she says as she leans forward, wraps her arms around me and squeezes, almost as tightly as her tiny hand had squeezed mine fourteen years before. She’s no longer the pretty young woman from the table across the way, the one I struggled not to objectify as she flashed her smile a few minutes ago.

All I feel now is the warm hug of a grateful little girl from my past, whose smile I finally got to see for the first time today.