Without a second thought, and only a perfunctory first one, Dill Winsome returned the box of lemonheads to the shelf and picked up, instead, a box of Boston Baked Beans. He didn’t know the reason for the exchange, because it was pretty reflexive and, as mentioned, thoughtless, neither was it complex, but Dill Winsome’s mind was the kind that responded to branding, and where lemonheads were a generic candy, the box of baked beans was trademarked.
Nonetheless, taste—a more basic instinct than brand loyalty—motivated a second exchange, and Dill Winsome took his box of lemonheads and his sweaty dime to the checkout line.
He was not first in line, he was not last in line, but he was shortest in line and youngest in line and by far the shopper with the fewest items and the least experience.
This is the story of Dill Winsome’s first ever-purchase with his first-ever money, and it’s a story with a global echo and a perfect resonance. In this story there is anxiety, doubt, restiveness, existential crisis, anticipation, ennui, pretense, excitement and the loss of innocence. Because Dill Winsome is six with a found dime and a grimy face and the real belief that he’s cheating his family of a certain small windfall by this indulgence and setting the trajectory of his life on the Wrong Path; that this found dime is not a found dime but a stolen one, by virtue of his failure to look for its owner; and that, then, there is an element of sin and blood in the silver coin, which he dropped to the counter prematurely so as not to burn the miniature bust of the dead president into his palm.
His turn was up, the line had shifted, and he placed his purchase on the counter, but the dirty dime and the box of lemonheads lay untouched and unnoted. For the first time in his life, Dill Winsome was utterly alone.
To recap, there was an epic moment of ambition, where the hero had asserted himself at the edge of a perilous vastness, doing what he’s only ever seen done, presenting himself at the door of the world’s indifference for the first time as something other than a child, constructing from observed action and the power of his own fledgling imagination a new self, and failing miserably.
Because the cashier passes him over, leaves the box of lemonheads and the grimy dime lying side by side on the counter and Dill Winsome’s insistent stare unacknowledged. Presenting Dill Winsome with the sure doubt of his own existence and a real-life conundrum.
This perhaps is where it gets sticky. Dill Winsome has been passed over. The cashier is ringing the next customer up. The world has turned the slightest bit on its axis and in the process flung the body of the little six-year-old boy, who sees eye-to-eye with the counter top, off the path to independence, adulthood, self-confidence and, if it is possible, the future. He will have to reassert himself or lose himself forever. What other choice does he have than the one between action and acquiescence? Between protest and oblivion? The nuances governing the morality of this exigency are clear to Dill Winsome, despite his age, though he cannot articulate them outside of fighting back a tear or two, to swallow the lump. Already blowing a dime, for which he did no work, on satisfying a superfluous physical appetite, of which his parents would not approve, in conscious neglect of his struggling family, Dill Winsome is now faced with the prospect of theft.
But he does not steal the lemonheads.
Instead, he rewinds time, collects the lemonheads, retraces his steps, moving back up the line to its end, takes the corner, makes a deliberate line to the candy aisle, replaces the box of candy (they make that subtle tambourine noise when they settle into place) and, ever so coolly, as far as cool goes in the eyes and ability of a six-year-old, and with the same degree of stealth and projected nonchalance, removes himself from the store, one forced and shaky step at a time, paying all the liquid wealth he has in the world for the mistake of believing in the value of so small and miserable a thing as a dime.
