Following in the Footsteps of Adam & Eve

Funny, the things we remember. While I’m sure I did some bratty things as a toddler and young child, I don’t remember doing anything in direct defiance or out of purposeful meanness. It was just little kid stuff done without malice or forethought. I do, however, remember the first time I deliberately chose to sin.

While in Kindergarten, I became friends with a young lady whose first name was Nancy, and whose middle name was Jingle. And with a middle ​name like that, one doesn’t need a surname. Nancy and I became fast friends. One day after school, Nancy produced a dime and invited me to join her in a candy feast. I gladly obliged and we skipped to the store where she spent that dime on penny candy. Now, in the mid-sixties, you could get a shwack of candy for ten cents because two or three jujubes or Mo-jos or blue whales only cost a penny, so a dime would garner you a small brown paper sack full of candies.

Two or three times, Nancy treated me to these sweet confections and then one day, she introduced me to the concept of economic equivalency, announcing that tomorrow would be my turn to bring the dime.
My turn??

Not only had the thought not occurred to me, but it was also quite an impossibility because I had no money of any sort, dimes included. As I pondered this dilemma, from out of nowhere, a thought popped into my head accompanied by a picture of my mom’s little red coin purse. The clear front of that coin purse typically boasted a plethora of coins.

Waiting until Mom and Grandma were busy cleaning up after supper, I snuck into the bedroom where Mom kept her purse, carefully removed her little red coin purse, and dove under the bed with it. There I extracted one, small, thin dime before closing the zipper and returning it to the purse. I had done it! I couldn’t believe how easy it had been and pocketing the coin, I excitedly waited for school to finish the next afternoon, so that Nancy and I could enjoy the spoils of my thievery.

Now, the problem with sin is that once it’s been committed, you either come clean, or you become more embroiled in it. Walking back to my grandparent’s home, I told Nancy and the other friends who accompanied us that we would need to eat our candy outside. Somehow, though, it lost its sweetness and appeal trying to wolf it all down in such a hurry.

Seeing us in the yard, my mom called me inside, so I carefully leaned my candy bag against the house and went in. My friends though, thought they would do me the tremendous favor of bringing it to the door where they presented it to Mom explaining that I had forgotten it outside.

Well, the gig was up. And even though Mom took away the candy, there was a tremendous freedom and relief in getting caught. It offered me an escape from the web that entangled and threatened to pull me deeper and deeper into the sin that began with not telling Nancy the truth about not having a dime. I wish I could say that this little episode was the last time I ever stole anything, or that I learned my lesson about lying, but it wasn’t, and I didn’t. Not yet anyway. Not for many years.
But those are stories for another day…