— January 22 —
Today’s picture triggers a little story that happened a few days ago.
I was at Target one evening, about a half hour before closing. Once I got inside I realized my lips were dry, so I reached into my pocket for my lip gloss, and in the process I knocked a coin out of my pocket. It sounded like a penny and so I almost kept on walking without looking at it. But curiosity got the best of me so I stopped and looked back. Sure enough, it was.
Now, I never bother to pick up a penny off the ground when I see one. I’ll always leave it for a little kid to get excited over. Sometimes I even drop or throw a few spare pennies I find in my pocket or purse onto the sidewalk, hoping it will make some little kid’s day.
But this one dropped out of my pocket while I was inside a store. I still considered just leaving it there, just walking on by, but something felt wrong about that. You don’t just drop things on the floor and leave them there when you’re shopping. I would have felt like a slob.
So I moved to pick it up, but before I could, a young boy of about ten or twelve, who was walking behind me with his family, jumped forward and picked it up and held it out for me.
I felt I could do nothing other than accept it from him and say thank you. After all, the boy was too old to get excited over a penny, right? But to take it from him made me feel like a stingy old miser.
So here’s how it went down. I dropped the penny. The boy picked it up for me. I accepted it with a thank you, and then after a moment I asked, “ya want it?” The boy hesitated only slightly and then said “Yeah!” I handed it to him and we both giggled. I walked away feeling generously silly, and he and his family chattered and laughed about it in Spanish so I don’t really know how he felt about the penny itself. But I assume he felt positive and it sort of made his day, like it did mine. Not for the value of the penny, but for the humanity of the exchange.
But in any case, it was one of those little human to human encounters that sort of added a little bit of sparkle to the rest of the evening.
