22. I Want it All, and I Want it Now
When I was little and getting glasses for the first time, I remember seeing a pile of cases and looking through them. There was one I really wanted but didn’t want to ask for because money was tight. There was also another, which I thought was the strangest and ugliest of the bunch. I kept opening and closing it while we were waiting in line, trying to figure out who had thought up the design for it.
Eventually, we got to the end of the line, finished our business, and left. The following week, she picked up the glasses for me–and also the glasses case I had kept looking at instead of the one I had wanted. I said nothing about it; I treasured that thing until the day it fell apart because the fact she had been paying so much attention to me meant everything.