Your shoes are more precious than you imagine

Both father and daughter are privileged.  The family has enough of an income to pay for such sudden ‘needs’.  But if you forget the occasion and the price this is what every father does for a daughter or at least wants to do.  The particular girl, to be fair, doesn’t bother her father like this all the time.  Usually she says ‘if you think it is ok and if you have money could please consider getting me (this or that)’.  On this occasion she just HAD to have the ‘sneakers’.  He understood.  He had money.  They were both happy. 

Happy and privileged.  Yes, that should be repeated.   Not all daughters are, though, and certainly not all fathers. 

There once lived a girl who must have either wanted or needed a pair of shoes.  We don’t know whether it was for a class trip, but that’s unlikely.  Maybe she just needed shoes to wear to school.  Maybe she asked for a pair or maybe she didn’t, perhaps because she knew that shoes are expensive and that there were other more important things that the family needed.  Anyway she did get a pair of shoes. Her grandfather had got her a pair.  To this day, no one knows why it was the grandfather and not the father or the mother who got the shoes.  Maybe the father was unemployed.  The mother, we know, was a domestic worker but maybe she didn’t earn much.  Maybe she didn’t have a father.  We only know of a little girl, her grandfather and a pair of shoes.