Without ever asking for it, she became a person who has been the focus of every eye and camera lens even before her coronation. She didn't solicit the attention, and the attendant news coverage, and she couldn't have stopped it even if she had wanted to. Unless you blame her for being born, you perhaps shouldn't resent all the decades of public fascination about her. She didn't apply for the job.  It has been a more-than-half-century storm of words, pictures, newsreels, videotapes, magazine covers, television specials, even feature films. She has lived in the (mostly) calm center of that storm, observing it rage all around her.  The storm gathers force at specific moments -- weddings and funerals foremost among them. With Friday's wedding of her grandson William to Catherine Middleton, she became once again, even in the midst of all that, a hub of X-ray-like scrutiny.  For her, it started in the era of Teletype operators and static-filled radio transmissions; on Friday, Twitter comments and color photographs sent from cell phones were reaching their intended audiences instantly. What must it be like, to have lived through six decades of that, from the era of big-circulation afternoon newspapers delivered by boxy, rumbling trucks to the era of crystal-clear, high-definition online video updates?  She'll probably never say, not in detail. Yet what a story that would be: Her own contemplations, from the heart of it, about being the seemingly stoic subject of all those words, spoken and written, of all those photos, still and moving. Her account of what it has felt like to be looking outward toward all of those who are aiming their eyes and their lenses inward. From the days of Linotype machines to the days of iPhones, being the woman on the receiving end of the perpetual stares.
Even as her grandson and his new bride were saying their vows Friday, there she was, being gazed upon by the world.It would have been an extraordinary, perhaps even terrifying, feeling, were it