Yesterday I was talking with a woman at a fall festival where they were giving out numerous fantastic door prizes for the raffle. I had secret dreams that the god of the raffle would bestow upon us the disney trip or the scuut bike. But when you enter your tickets just before the last 10 prizes, your chances aren’t nearly as good.
This woman’s daughter apparently had been pining at the American Girl doll. However, the winner’s name didn’t match that of this woman’s daughter. “She’ll be heartbroken,” she told me. Ah, yes. The childlike state of wanting something so bad, right now.
Moments later the daughter arrived in tears.
“Aww,” I sympathized. “Perhaps something Santa would want to know?”
“Oh, she already has one,” the woman corrected. “It’s just that she sees it down there and, you know. She wants it.”
This made me terribly, terribly sad. Perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of fear, perhaps because it revealed my own heart. But I’m sad. For this woman, but mostly for this little girl.