Goines On: Why no gift from Santa?

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Goines had to go walking without his cane this morning. They had been smelling gas around the clothes dryer and when Mrs. Goines called the gas company, they said they’d treat it as an emergency and send a man out. The Goineses should vacate the house immediately without turning anything on or off and go at least 330 feet away from the house.
    They put on their coats and did as advised. Goines hadn’t been able to collect his cane from the garage because opening the door from the laundry room would have turned on a garage light.
    At the corner, Mrs. Goines said she’d wait there for the gas man and suggested Mr. Goines go ahead and take a walk.
    So, without his cane, off he went.
    Goines felt odd without his cane, even if he more often just carried it than used it. He guessed he associated a sense of safety, of preparedness, with the cane.
    As he approached the house of a man he had made friends with some months ago by their standing chatting in the man’s driveway, Goines felt a sense of antipathy toward the man, and toward his wife, whom he had eventually met too, and found very friendly and outgoing.
    Antipathy? he wondered, and soon identified its origins in his disappointment over something the couple had failed to do, even after the Goineses had given them a persimmon in November, which the couple told him they really liked.
    For Christmas, the couple had put up lights and installed in their front yard reindeer ornaments and a letterbox for mail to Santa. Goines told the husband he would leave a letter.
    Because Goines had told both the husband and the wife about his blog, and even emailed them a link to it, which the wife had acknowledged, he decided to ask Santa to leave a comment there, on any posting he chose; that was what Goines wanted for Christmas. The next time they chatted, the husband told him that Santa had received the letter.
    But here it was March 1, more than two months later, and Goines still had heard nothing from Santa.
    But now, as he neared their empty driveway, he could see he wasn’t going to be able to tell them how disappointed he was over Santa’s ignoring his simple request, nor tell them that he was even feeling angry toward them over it.
    Continuing homeward, Goines could only speculate how a gas leak might have provoked such uncustomary feelings in a man usually given to loving his neighbors and doing them good deeds.

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