Clive and his daughter are playing, roughhousing, having a great time, when his glasses accidentally fall off and break. Clive becomes furious. He completely loses it, without thinking about how this will affect his daughter at all. She begins to cry.
He immediately brings himself under control. He tries every way he can imagine to calm her. He apologizes profusely. He tries to make it funny. But of course it’s already too late.
Finally, she offers, sniffling and wiping back tears, to tape his glasses back together.
“No,” he says, “that’s not necessary.”
He tries to explain that he wouldn’t want to wear glasses that have been taped back together, even if it was a very good job, but this doesn’t make any sense to her. All she sees is the angry dad in the moments after the accident happened, as if he blamed her and there’s no way possible to make things right again.
Even while this is happening he’s wondering how things could have possibly developed this way, how he could have failed so spectacularly.
He suggests, after a few minutes, that instead of trying to fix them, they will replace them, and he will let her pick out the new frames. She ends up choosing blue ones, and is absolutely adamant about it. She knows a boy with blue frames. “They’re definitely normal,” she insists.
He relents without much protest. She giggles when he puts them on for the first time. She smiles every time she looks at him after that.
It feels right.
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