I saw an older couple I know on an outing with their eleven year old daughter in downtown Reston. She was dressed up in an old-fashioned way, with a ribbon in her hair, a white blouse with short ballooning sleeves, and a long blue skirt, and wherever they went, she would run ahead of her parents ten or twenty feet and wait for them to catch up, or run back to them as if to report like a breathless scout returning from far afield. I was about to go out to them from the cafe where I'd been trying to write, but something about the way her parents glided behind her, smiling patiently, contentedly, following their shining daughter with their lives in their eyes wherever she went, made me feel like I would be intruding.