Dina's Special Christmas present

Dina was in a car accident when she was 8 years old right before the school year started. She missed school, but she really missed her friends. Her last birthday was filled with girls she knew since the first grade that sang “Happy Birthday” to her. 

Those girls had school and after school stuff. No one really came around to see her when she got back home from the hospital. Her school stuff was delivered by school supervisors. She never even saw teachers. 

Christmas came and she still did school work at home in her wheelchair. 

“How m’I supposed to shop for Christmas?” She asked her mother. 

“We’ll figure something out.”

“Can I take my wheelchair to Willowbrook?” 

“Sure. There is a way to go there. Saturdays are too busy and the crowds will push us around so we have to go during the week.”

“What about school?”

“That is something to think about. We can go and do homework when we get home.”

Dina’s mother delayed going to the mall but Dina persisted until December 12th. They packed up her chair and bags and drove to a Kmart so they could walk around and see the Christmas sights. A plastic Santa face welcomed them at the automatic opening doors. The aisles were clear of customers so Dina could move her chair from aisle to shelf.

 It had been months since she saw the inside of a store. 

Red sweaters were in the clothes aisle. Plastic trees were lined in the back. They changed the style of lights for trees. The lights at home are big screw in lights on a string. Now they make small lights that pop out and in. There are twinkling lights on strings. They put Graham cracker boxes at the end of aisles to make Gingerbread houses. There were plastic reindeer models and giant Santas. 

Dina rolled her chair to an aisle that had tree ornaments. The first one she saw was mirrored like a disco ball. It showed her face in different angles and different parts of her face. She had thin eyebrows that she never paid attention to. Her nose was kind of flat at the end. 

Since the accident, she never looked at herself. She looked at the victim in the wheelchair. She looked at the adults as they made way for her. She looked out the window at former friends walk home from school. 

This ornament showed her that she was still herself. She was still Dina, the grade school kid that went places and had fun. She wasn’t the victim. Those adults looked at her wrong. She saw herself as she was. She rolled that wheelchair in the store by herself. No pity-taking adult helped her. 

“Do you want that one?” Her mother asked. 

“Yes.” She put in on the tree at home herself. She was able to do this because she was still Dina, not the victim of a car crash.