Howdy, folks. It's Christmas Eve, and I suppose that's a good time for us to share favorite stories about Christmases past. My own most lasting Christmas memory (apart from the delirium-grade joy I felt on getting a castle-and-knights set - come to think it, on getting almost anything - as a 5-year old), takes a bit of telling, and perhaps a bit of - what, courage? shamelessness? perversty? - to tell. So here goes:
A few years ago I heard someone remark that the shoplifting impulse isn't about wanting to steal the objects in question, but a sublimated desire for "stealing" something else - very often, affection. Although I'm usually the sort who would hear something like that and say, No, actually, I believe shoplifting is about stealing stuff you want but can't or won't buy. . . that theory struck a chord in me. I thought, Hmmmm, that makes a lot of sense. . .
Of course, I would have to think that, given that I had a problem with shoplifting when I was a youth.
The incident that matters for our purposes took place when I was about 12 or 13, an age at which I ought to have known better, but didnt. It happened in a hardscrabble, medium-sized town in rural Pennsylvania, Towanda. That's hard by the Susquehanna River, deep in farm country. We were there on December 23rd because my father had to got to a realtor's office to attend a closing.
We were selling the farm where I had spent so many of my happiest hours as a kid, and we weren't doing it willingly. My father had bought it in partnership with a handful of friends who rarely ended up using the place (the big old house was basically a wreck, but I was always comfortable and content in it) and ultimately forced us to sell. It was a shock to my father to learn that the "gentleman's agreement" he had insisted upon - that nobody would sell unless everyone wanted to sell - was legally worthless and unenforceable.
So dad took me along to Towanda, at a time when the trip in December was a pretty hazardous, five-hour haul over mostly two-lane roads. I remember rolling across the Susquehanna on a tall steel bridge that loomed in the dark, with snowflakes madly flying around in the lights, and the dark water of the river swirling below. We checked into a bare bones hotel, and my father told me to stay put in the hotel while he went to sign the final papers at the realtors.
In the morning, he promised, we'd take a ride out to the farm to have a last look and leave flowers at the grave of our dog, Lady, whom we had buried there just 12 months earler.
After dad left, I sat on the metal-framed bed (it had a white cotton bedspread, festooned with tight rows of little white chenille balls), stared at the hospital-green walls, and listened to the steam radiator hiss and clank. But soon I rose and went out. I liked downtown Towanda: there was a pharamacy that also served as a kind of general store, a Western Auto Parts store that also carried hardware and sporting goods, and the pride of the town, a JJ Newberry's department store.
And I had a plan. I had not bought any Christmas presents (I honestly can't remember if it was because i had wasted the money i should have saved for that purpose, or because I simply didn't have any), and I figured I could easily steal them in a place where people were as backward and trusting as Towanda. I do remember that I was wearing dark jeans and a red checked western-style shirt, over which I had a truly hideous brown-and-black sweater with sort of a Mondrian pattern in some kind of mohair that was long and had tufts, like troll hair.
My first stop was the pharmacy, where I picked out a nice wallet for my father, and shoved it under my sweater and into my belt. They also had one of those ubiquitious Zippo lighter displays and, as I was a cigarette smoker, I took a fancy to one with a plastic bubble on its side, with a fancy fishing fly floating around inside it. so I stole that, even though it wasn't, technically, a Christmas present for anyone but myself. It came in a long package with some extra flints and some free lighter fluid, so that too had to go under my sweater and into my belt.
Nothin' to it.
Before I left, I took a nice fountain pen, too, knowing that one of my sisters would take great pleasure in using it to exercise her excellent penmanship - something in which I had no interest whatsoever, because all I thought about in school was getting out of school.
I left, thinking, much like Jesse James might have after robbing the Glendale train, that was easy. . .So it was down to the Western Auto Parts where, frankly, I'm not sure what I took, if anything. Maybe I desisted, out of respect for the place. It had a nice fishing department where I had purchased many useful items on previous trips to Towanda. It's more likely that I saw nothing that would make a nice present, and there was no point in stealing fishing stuff because that was seasonal stock. There wasn't much of it, and what there was couldn't be used for months, anyway. And who knew where I would be going fishing at that time?
It was on to the mother lode, Newberrys. The department store was huge, and it had three floors and . . . escalators! I decided to go to the top and work my way down to the main floor. I picked up some sort of bauble for my cousin and, I think, and a few other odds and ends. Frankly, I had exhausted my shopping list, but the pickings were good, so I carried on until I had no place left to stuff things. Yet I had made a mental note not to forget to get - steal - my mother a pair of gloves.
I went downstairs, found a nice pair of soft and supple, fur-lined leather gloves, and shoved them into my waist as well. I was done with my Christmas "shopping", and headed for the exit. Just as I was about to leave, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder. I turned around to face a stern-looking lady who asked me to come with her. She was holding one of the gloves I had boosted. Apparently, the string holding the gloves together had broken, and one of the gloves fell out from under my mohair Mondrian sweater to give me away.
I was taken to the third floor offices, where a man whom I presume was the store manager grilled me, asking my name, where I was from, and what I had stolen. "Just the gloves." I lied, shifting in the chair to relieve the pressure of the stuff jammed into my waist. He then called the police department, and a few minutes later a constable came and drove me to the station house. There, they took me into a back room and asked me where I was staying. I refused to tell them, knowing there would be hail to play when my father found out. But they sweated me. Not that it took much.
While we waited for my father to arrive, the police asked me to put everything I had stolen onto the table. I emptied my pockets - there was quite a pile of stuff. But I didn't take the stuff out from under my sweater. I have no idea why I decided to gut it out, but I did. The one thing I know for sure is that it wasn't because I somehow thought I could could outwit or out-bluff the police. There was something else going on.
Soon my father arrived, in a panic because he thought something terrible had happened to me (my father was like that; it never did occur to him that I was, basically, a juvenile delinquent). I'll never forget the look of shock and disbelief on his face when the police told him that I had not, say, been bitten by a dog. I had been caught stealing. The worst part was that I felt the rest of the stolen stuff practically burning a hole in my stomach. But there was no turning back now.
The police were extremely nice. They explained that the Towanda town custom was for someone who was caught shoplifing to pay for the goods he or she had stolen, without getting to keep them - they went back to the store. Even at that age, I appreciated the Solomon-esque wisdom of that policy - and silently thanked God that they hadn't found the rest of my contraband.
So dad quietly and gratefully paid for the goods and we were free to go.
I expected to get a licking, but instead my father took me for a long walk, and tried to talk to me. I didn't feel much like talking. I looked down over the edge of the bridge, at the river sliding dark brown and lithe far below. In the spring, it would be loaded with smallmouth bass, as it had been in every spring when dad took me down, fishing. Tires of passing cars and trucks rumbled and hummed on the icy steel grating, the snowflakes flew like so many tiny bottle rockets, disappering into the darkness, evaporating like bitter kisses the moment they touched the river.
My father probed, trying to find out if something was troubling me. Wondering if somewhere or other he had gone wrong. That wasn't an issue for me. By then, I knew that most everybody had gone wrong, somewhere, often through no fault of his own, and there was no point dwelling on it.
Honestly, I can't remember the conversation, although I felt that my father was shaken and concerned. That bothered me. It made me feel guilty, especially wiith all that booty still jammed in my belt. I remained sullen and withdrawn; this was an impasse. I just walked along, deflecting the questions, revealing nothing, saying everything was all right although i knew danged well that it wasn't, not by a long shot. But I thought of that Zippo lighter. Somehow, that thing was an emblem of, if not exactly victory, then of not having been entirely beaten yet.
I never did let on, about anything. My father put his arm on my shoulder as we walked back to the run-down hotel. It felt a little heavy and wooden there, but that was okay too. The following day, after we made our last visit to the farm, we drove home in the bright sunshine.
So there's my Christmas story, folks. What the hail, they can't all be happy, can they?
But that's what happened, and I did worse things, and I also did better things, over time. There were happier Christmases, and a few more melancholy ones as well. I'm glad Christmas comes every year, as I sit here in the dead of night, looking at the tree that gives Luke such exquisite pleasure, anticipating how he will look when he rips the paper off his Playmobil knights-and-castle set.
I hope you all have a wonderful light-and-warmth filled Christmas. I'll be back on Thursday.