They hung in pairs on metal racks, vacant eyeballs staring blankly at the world around them. Big ones, small ones, white ones, pink ones, each waiting for its clandestine assignment. My granddaughter Alyssa would prowl through the racks, carefully pondering each one. Then, glancing over her shoulder, she would see me nearby and sternly wave me away. She and I were on conflicting missions. I was watching over her. She was buying her first bra.

There within hours of her birth, I had heard her first cries, felt the first grasps of her tiny hands and held her in my arms. My family said I looked stiff and uncomfortable, even amusing. Maybe so, but when you’re Grandpa Dave, holding something so precious, how you look doesn’t matter.

I thought it would be the same at Mervyn’s that Saturday evening, one’s purpose more important than his appearance. I was unique, to be sure — the only man that night not using Mervyn’s as a shortcut to HomeTown Buffet. It was an awkward role for me, eyes glancing at other aisles, then stealing glimpses at Alyssa, flitting from one rack to another. “Don’t mind me,” I would say if anyone asked. “I’m just doing a little Christmas shopping. In May. Never too early, you know” — but nobody asked.

Minutes felt like hours, every shopper aging before my eyes and every bra looking the same, like the rolling hills of a San Diego subdivision.

I hadn’t noticed a bra until I was 12. It was the one worn by a buxom Debbie Reynolds in those “Tammy” movies. She was the backwoods girl with the worldly wisdom. I didn’t get the wisdom part, but I saw all the Tammy sequels, just to watch her.

In my 20s, they burned bras. The evening news showed activists dumping theirs into a smoking burn barrel. That was the feminist protest designed to arouse the nation’s conscience. And it surely aroused me, but I didn’t get the downside.

By then, the bra had become a fashion statement rather than a seismic retrofit. Still, it seemed inconceivable to me that I would ever have to worry about shopping for one. That was the woman’s job. Mine was buying my own underwear. Oh yeah. She had to do that, too.

Back at Mervyn’s, other shoppers had come and gone, but Alyssa was still poking through the racks. “Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?” I whispered. “I’ll know it when I see it,” she snapped. Note to the future Mr. Alyssa: You’d better see this one coming.

I summoned a clerk. “This young lady needs help selecting a bra. Could you do it?”

Visibly annoyed, Alyssa told me to wait in the men’s department. She would let me know when she was done. There was no place to sit, although I considered the store’s baby carriage, but what would I say if I got stuck: “Mommy’s buying a bra?” I leaned against a clothing rack and pondered my fate.

Overhead, scores of small nodules hung from the ceiling. They were security cameras, surveying every inch of floor space. Somewhere in the building’s bowels, grizzled men gulping black coffee stared at TV monitors as they watched for shoplifters.

“Go ahead. Have a laugh,” I said to the camera. “May the straps of a thousand Wonderbras strangle you in your sleep.”

Forty minutes later, Alyssa appeared with the plastic bag in her hand. Mission accomplished. Back home, she appeared wearing a T-shirt. “Can you see I’m wearing a bra?” she asked. I said yes. “Then I’ll have to wear a coat over it.” I was about to say that I wouldn’t see she was wearing a bra if she wasn’t wearing one, but I knew the logic would be lost on her.

On television that night, they were still discussing what those superdelegates would do, and the Giants were giving another ball game away. Upstairs, Alyssa was back to watching “Hannah Montana” and whistling a tune. No doubt she was engaging in some project that would leave paper scraps and glue all over the floor, and the rest of the room looking like a swamp.

Bra not withstanding (or outstanding), she’d be a 9-year-old a while longer. And I can live with that.

Dave Silverbrand is a local television personality and teaches journalism at the College of the Redwoods.