The Jewelry Box
I was crazy about jewelry boxes when I was five years old.
I can’t remember if I saw it on TV or in a magazine but I desperately wanted a jewelry box with a dancing ballerina.
I wanted one so bad that everyday I would eagerly wait for my dad to come home hoping that he’ll hand me a pretty little package containing the object of my fascination.
I prayed and pleaded that I would soon get my jewelry box. I imagined that it would make me so happy, it would be my most prized possession.
One day, my parents bought me a wooden jewelry box that was varnished and painted with an image of Rainbow Brite and Twink. It had two drawers to put my sparkly gold chain and dainty little earrings in, but there was no dancing ballerina.
Though I was thankful for the gift, I still pined for my dream jewelry box.
Years passed and I eventually moved on to liking other things. I became more interested in school, boys and other stuff that made kids think they were a lot older.
I forgot all about my fascination for the jewelry box and the dancing ballerina. Until one day, my grandma, who was working in Italy, sent me a package that contained a little pretty thing: a pink jewelry box with, not just one, but two sparkling ballerinas.
A few months later, she sent me another jewelry box: a brown rectangular one with mirrors that parted at the center and two ballerinas. Months after, I received a heart-shaped jewelry box with one ballerina.
I now had more jewelry boxes than I ever wished for.
Though I was grateful to have them, the jewelry boxes did not make me as happy as I thought it would. They did not even become my prized possessions. All of them actually ended up in the waste bin years later.
Two lessons I learned from the jewery box:
- If you want something so bad, you can / will get it sooner or later.
- Sometimes when you finally get what you want, you realize it cannot make you happy and it’s not what you wanted after all.
Can you remember something that you wanted so bad when you were a kid?
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Just Jayme. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
when i was around 8 or 9 years old i wanted to have a 72-piece crayola set (the one that came in a plastic case with multi-levels for each color palette), and i got one when someone came home from the US. since then i’ve treasured it. guess what, it’s still alive today. the pieces still intact, save for a few unlucky ones. 
Jayme April 7th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Ris: It’s a good thing you managed to save your crayons. We moved house a lot of times before that’s why I had to get rid of some of my stuff sooner or later. The memory of those boxes are still vivid to me though, especially the lessons I learned from them.
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