Moral Decision

I was tutoring a young girl in the ocarina. Her mother owned an occult store. We were all good friends, and she trusted me with the tutoring, mostly because I was (a) educational for the kid, (b) very good at tutoring.

I was in the store, buying a small crystal ball in a beautiful wooden case covered in a patterned fabric. The owner demanded £39.45, which I paid without hesitation because, you know, if you've got to dream, what's the point of dreaming of being broke?

I made my way home, and stopped halfway to drop in on the daughter. She offered to polish the crystal ball, and I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

It turned out that the kid was sitting on the thing, with no intention of handing it back to me, polished or unpolished. She then told me that she was going to phone her Mum and ask her if someone had stolen the crystal ball from her store.

So I picked up my own phone and called the mother instead. She rang the girl back and got her to let go of the item, at long last, so I could go home.

To my amazement, the girl turned up the following morning, on the stoop of my home - which basically looked like the railway station in town, only decommissioned and with the rails removed, and the land all around basically returning to grassland.

The girl turned up with her ocarina in hand, expecting me to tutor her.

I was faced with a moral choice, to forgive or to condemn. I forgave and told her to sit on the platform next to me, to begin the lesson.

When the mother called on me later, she asked me why I'd continued to give her daughter a lesson. I replied "One, I had a choice: if I'd cancelled all the lessons going forward, I'd have planted a bad memory in the daughter, one she would be looking back on and regretting the rest of her days. She might have done something rash on her way home, like throwing away her ocarina or even smashing it; and the kid showed a lot of promise, and I would not want to kill that creative spirit in her at the very time she was best poised to learn to be creative.

"Two, I didn't want to ruin her life like that. Not my place to be petty and vindictive.

"Three, the only person ever authorised to punish a child is the child's parent. Not my business to make the girl face the consequences of her mistake.

"Four ... I wanted to tell the girl a profound truth: all kids make mistakes. Most kids grow up in time and become adults, like me, like her mother ... but we never learn to not make mistakes, and in fact we make new mistakes, and bad things happen to both kids and adults even if we do not make mistakes, like rain or unexpected bills. The only difference being, we can all learn to love the rain, but only the adults worry about the bills, so that their kids never have to until they are adults, with kids of their own, and it'll be their turn to worry about the bills."

And on that note, the alarm sounded. I never got the mother's or the kid's reaction. But I hope I did well enough by them.