True pathos

I just got finished talking about hands as symbols--the same hands that dropped my radio into the toilet the other night while I was...well, you know. And the self same hands that dropped my ice cream cone just as I walked out of the store.

I took my kid sister to get an ice cream cone at Rite Aid a couple days ago and just as we were exiting the store I brushed something off my shirt, but my hand overshot and I knocked the cone out of my other hand. It landed smack on its side, crushing part of the cone and making that sickening crunch sound like when you drop an egg on the floor. Time stood still for a few moments as her and I just stared wide-eyed at the smashed cone, watching a trickle of butter pecan begin to run away from the wreck like the chocolate syrup they used for blood in the original Psycho. Then her little face turned up to me and with the saddest eyes I've ever seen she said, "That's the saddest thing in the whole world." And she meant it. And I felt it. And anybody else would have too.

It's amazing how the littlest incidents, trivialities really, will elicit such genuine heart-felt pathos unlike anything the evening news can. It's like when, as little kids, we would help my father make his lunch the night before only to discover in the morning when we reached for the milk that he'd forgotten it. The sight of that wrinkled, tin foil bundle left conspicuously on the top shelf would put a lump in our throats and our little worlds would melt in a teary film.