. . . I wore as a young man in a foreign city was not making eye contact. Because, I suppose, I had the sort of eyes that impressed others as belonging to a lost soul (I have tried to change this, with middling results), meeting someone’s glance could lead to uncomfortable contretemps, like that time in Cambridge when a stray look around the cafe called forth an eerie guy from the shadows.

But I digress. The point is that there used to be in the seventies a bookshop in London with a life-size wax manikin of Freud standing in its front room. My recollection is that the shop specialized in poetry and was out a bit from the center of town. Although I found a handful of Heaney paperbacks I’d been looking for, I had a question. Not making eye contact, I sidled up to the gentleman standing next to the register. “Do you have such-and-such a volume by Ted Hughes?” No answer. I glanced up.

Like the girl from Ipanema, the bearded man looked straight ahead not at me. It took a few seconds, the longest few seconds I can remember, while a sequence of fright and confusion and embarrassment bounced across my brain. Feeling I’d been the seventies version of “punked,” I looked around to see the reaction. No eye contact? Good. I paid a real person and left the shop.