When you’re blessed, as I was, with a healthy, pleasant, and generally good childhood, you really have to look hard to find heartbreak. When all you’ve known is stability and pleasantness, though, little problems can seem like big disasters. Such is the delight and tragedy of childhood that you can be in a divine delight over a toy or a hug in one minute, and in the depths of despair over a lost marble in the next.

When you’re a child, your heart is easily delighted and just as easily broken.

I find something strangely compelling about the little things that seem like great wrongs as a child. So, I give you a series of such tales: Trivial Tragedies, a series of insignificant heartbreaks. I’ll keep a running list of the stories here as I publish them:

• Trivial Tragedy #1: The Telescope
• Trivial Tragedy #2: Minimum System Requirements
• Trivial Tragedy #3: The Great One’s Autograph
• Trivial Tragedy #4: Hands Hands Fingers Thumb
• Trivial Tragedy #5: Man-e-faces
• Trivial Tragedy #6: The case of the broken case
• Trivial Tragedy #7: The science class lie
• Trivial Tragedy #8: The coconut