little miss nimblefingers

I was in the dollar store today. A little girl was in a cart, being wheeled around by her mother. The girl was having a grand time - talking to strangers, a merry extrovert was she. I was one of those she spoke to, after her cart almost bumped me. In the checkout line, i was in front of them. Her mother, absorbed in their transactions, didn't notice when the girl started tossing nearby hanging items into their cart. I almost said out loud, chidingly but playfully, "Watch out for little miss nimblefingers there".
But i didn't.
Why?
Social moments pass in a blink, giving us only microseconds to determine our behavior. I knew that there was much to be gained by speaking, in terms of her social development. What was at stake was nothing less than a child's evolving attitude toward strangers and society. With the right tone, and twinkle in my eye, she could have forever had a more positive, open, friendly attitude toward nothing less than life itself.
Am i overstating the case? I don't think so. There are a million moments in any child's life, so it's easy to think that a single one of them might be irrelevant. One might assume that this child's nature was obviously already outgoing, so a moment that would be forgotten minutes or seconds later would have no particular import.
But i don't think that's the way life works. I think most people can't even begin to grasp the interconnected continuity of life.
I think the process of a child's socialization is relentless, the little spongy scamps. Constantly testing and collecting data. Way below the surface, their subconscious supercomputers never stop. Adults too, in a less focused way. The tiniest moment does matter...each moment creates ripples that are forever creating other ripples, throughout millions and billions of people and other life forms. I'm reminded of one of the more eye-rolling conceits of the STAR TREK universe, the notion that one can go back or forth in time while maintaining the integrity of the timeline. Predestination paradoxes may be well and good...but the idea that one can safely remove a person who "didn't affect history", or even walk through an alien village in disguise, without ultimately changing EVERYTHING about that world, is just silly.
To think about a child in this way can be overwhelming, particularly for parents, who are forced to assume wayyyyy too much responsibility for their offspring in this society's nuclear family paradigm of isolation...but that's another story.
I'm forced to feel a little sad...that in some way i may have let that little girl (and by extension, the universe) down.
I figured out pretty quickly why i stayed silent. I censored my word choice, and didn't have time to come up with something better. Living in a society in which women are not yet fully equal to men, i didn't want to call a girl "little"...that kind of terminology can be diminishing in this man's world (no matter that she WAS little, relative to most everyone - there was still a danger). I also realized that "miss" was no good. It wasn't so long ago that a woman was no more than some man's property. "Miss" is simply shorthand for "unclaimed uterus". That's why there's no equivalent male title.
Curse and damn those "Little Miss" children's books. You know the ones. Or maybe you don't. They were cute, well-intentioned, and fed into my head at a very impressionable age. That's the trouble with life, though.
Pretty much everything is well-intentioned.