Our neighbor

 Our neighbor — a successful business owner — sent his seven-year-old daughter over to play at our house one afternoon. Her parents absolutely adore her, and her mom is always taking care of her, so her life is usually pretty picture-perfect.

But that particular day, two things happened at once.

First, everyone in our house was busy and overwhelmed.

Second, I had decided to make lamb on the grill.

And of course, right at the worst possible moment, a giant bag of charcoal split open in the garage. Black dust went everywhere. The floor, the shelves, the boxes — it looked like a small mining operation had exploded in there. Before I could even start cleaning, I had to move half the stuff out of the garage first.

So I spread out a tarp and got to work.

That’s when the neighbor’s daughter walked up to me very seriously and announced that she had been “assigned to help.”

I tried several times to convince her to go play outside instead, but she refused with impressive determination. However, her enthusiasm for getting completely filthy was apparently limitless.

So I gave her an “official mission” — carrying out small, clean, lightweight items from the one corner of the garage I hadn’t yet turned into a coal pit.

Truthfully, it wasn’t much help, but it kept her entertained and made her feel important.

As you can probably guess… despite all my efforts, she still managed to get absolutely covered in charcoal dust.

About thirty minutes later, her parents came to pick her up.

The moment they saw her blackened hands and dirty clothes, I could tell from their faces that panic was setting in. They looked at me like something had gone horribly wrong.

But once I explained what she had actually been doing, they relaxed immediately.

Then her father started laughing and showed me a text message she had sent earlier that afternoon between her French lessons and private music tutoring:

“Loading coal. If I finish before dinner, they promised to feed me.”

I still laugh about it to this day, because it sounded less like a little girl from a wealthy suburban family and more like a child laborer from the Industrial Revolution.