"Is she your daughter?" I asked the woman who was playing with a child in the YMCA pool. I was exercising in a corner of the pool. The girl had sought me out so she could proudly display the gap in her teeth from a missing baby tooth.

"No. She's my granddaughter, but thank you," the woman replied with a laugh.

In fact, I was pretty sure she was too old to be the child's mother. But I was not about to say this aloud.

Later in our conversation, she found a way to suggest I looked quite young, too (for my apparent age).

The conversation got me thinking about Shakespeare's Sonnet #138, and its memorable last couplet:

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Now, unlike our exchange, the narrator in the sonnet is referring to himself and a lover who have both lied to each........

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