This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

The first such tale is about desire, hope, and value.

I was in the fourth-grade and had spied an object of desire in the Consumer’s Distributing catalogue (source of several such tragic desires). It was a telescope that cost $39.

As I recall, I saved up my money for months, but given the limited income streams of a ten-year-old, I can only assume the money came in one form or another from my parents. That they let me think I was saving up my own money is a prime example of how good things were for me.

In the time it took to “save my money”, my expectations of the performance of the telescope grew. By the time I actually got the telescope, I had Hubble-like expectations. I would be able to see the U.S. flag on the moon and rings of Saturn. I would be discovering habitable extra-solar planets and putting Einstein’s theories to the test.

The time finally came to buy the telescope. I can still picture it. About two inches in diameter, about a foot-and-a-half long, it stood on a small plastic tripod stand.

We set it up on the window-sill in our family room and pointed it towards an enormous, bright, full moon.

It sucked.

It was easier to see the moon with the naked eye than through this piece of junk. We thought maybe it was broken, but the more we used it, the more it became clear that what had seemed like a NASA-sized budget to a fourth-grader just wasn’t enough to buy a worthwhile stargazing device.

I had squandered my limited childhood financial resources on a worthless device. The lesson I can see in retrospect was one of dangerous expectations. The longer and more deeply you want something, the less likely it will be able to meet your ballooning expectations. As you’ll see later in this tragic series, this was not a lesson I learned at the time.