Girl and Merchant, Katmandu, Nepal, 1983 In 1983 if you told me I would someday be a father I would have emphatically said "NO WAY". It was only a year earlier that I would have said that I would never marry. How fortunate that age brought me to my senses on both counts. I was married in 1982 and my wife Nancy and I had our daughter Laurel in 1995. This scene made me feel compassion for this little girl doing her shopping and the stern merchant reaching his hand out for her money. A picture of a mundane exchange. But that is not how I see these scenes. Anytime I glimpse the human condition in a state of harmony or balance or discord or sadness I am gripped with empathy. I don't know why this is. That the girl and vendor kept on going with their activity strikes me now as being a stoke of luck. No stares at my dumb western thinking.