Remembering Forward, Part I

My father once gave me this little piece of his old Visa Credit card after he had cut it up. It had this little holographic image of a bird on it. He thought that I would like it. And I did. For the longest time I kept it safely tucked away in the bottom of my blue and white pencil holder (where it sat nestled against the ends of mechanical pencils and pens, separated by a thin wall of plastic from the mini-paper clip drawer). It was something from him…

This morning I pulled a triangular tri-point highlighter (one of the three colors—green, yellow and red—at each of the triangle’s three corners) from my backpack and laid it on my desk. I was intending to neatly and safely file away the unused highlighter in that haphazard desk drawer filled with unused pens, pencils and paperclips when she came downstairs to say good morning. She picked up the triangle curiously. Almost as an afterthought I said, “You can have that if you want Maia.”

“I can?! Oh, thank you!”
Now I wish that I hadn’t selfishly shoved aside my first impulse to give it to her (I’ll use it someday) and had freely offered it to her to begin with. What would her reaction have been like then? Either way, it was something from her daddy, something that she could color with.