I’m holding up four fingers, at this very moment, even though you can’t see them.

But, that’s it: four items. Four, random though purposeful, inconsequential items.

One of those items was a candy bar. A Kit-Kat, actually, and it was easily stolen because I used to run the “candy store” between class periods, at my high school. 

The smart kids got to do everything fun, especially when it involved cash handling.

What do you want from me? The Kit-Kat logo is copyrighted.

I only stole one candy bar and only the one time because I had convinced myself that morning that I was experiencing the onset of premature adult diabetes, which I think is how most people experience it…very suddenly.

I mean, it can’t take, like, what, about twenty minutes, tops?

I had my assumed hypoglycemic attack right before third period (World History), standing behind that booth in my maroon windbreaker and tight-rolled jeans and I didn’t want to walk all the way to my locker to get my money (rather, I couldn’t. Who would run the “candy store?”) so I just took the Kit-Kat and ate it, right then and there.

I never paid for it.

Then there was the time that I thought I’d stolen ice cream. But, it was at a buffet. So, there’s that. Shan dared me to do it, truth be told. We were returning from a church youth trip where we’d done some noble thing like sing hymns to the homeless outside Wal-Mart, something like that, and we’d stopped on the way back to eat at this restaurant called Quincy’s, now gone the way of the dodo. It was a country-style buffet, so naturally everything was included in the price, even the ice cream.

Still, I thought I was being a rebel. I was, let’s face it, not the brightest bulb in the tool box.

Oh, did they laugh at me.

What was I to do to get even except roll their yards.

During my formative years of high school (when most of my five-finger discount days were lived), there was something akin to an unofficial moratorium on rakish youth purchasing more than one package of toilet paper. Honestly. A policeman, Toby (as it was a small town, we all knew each other. Also, he went to my church) would patrol the aisles, but especially on Halloween and Valentine’s Day.

(Far be it from me to tell you why Valentine’s Day was the other hallmark holiday of choice for Those Who Rolled Yards).

This problem then, as you see, was what led to my next stolen item: toilet paper. Now, I wasn’t about to waltz into Piggly Wiggly and try to manhandle a suspicious amount of TP. I couldn’t risk the scorn come Sunday if Toby caught me.

No, I had to plan this out, accordingly. And it began with a sudden rash of sleepovers. I planned this crime spree out over three weeks, with my cousin Mikey’s help. It was a perfect cover. Who didn’t like a sleepover?

Ninth graders in my town, at my school, certainly did.

If you look closely, you can see better.

We all had freshly minted driver’s permits, which meant you could drive to one of three places, without much issue: Piggly Wiggly, Sonic, and the movies (and sometimes if you played your cards right, the First Baptist Church parking lot across from the funeral home…but let’s not push it). 

The sleepover came in handy because we didn’t all have cars.

So, under the guise of liking people I didn’t, I spent several long nights, “hanging out,” driving the “strip” about a million times over for some unknown reason – it always tickled me that I ever did the “strip.” I mean for crying out loud, I saw these people every day, all day, the whole week long.

This must be what they mean when they say that youth is wasted on the young.

Then back at the house of choice, as we all settled in for the night, I’d excuse myself to the bathroom and snatch a roll of their toilet paper; incidentally, you can tell a lot about a family from their choice of toilet paper. Anyway, I’d carefully hide it in my overnight bag, and after a few weekends of drivel and driving, I’d amassed a goodly pile of paper products.

The rest I stole from my own house, which, when all was said and done, was not the best of ideas.

Now…that’s what, like, three items, right?  Well, two, I guess:  the ice cream doesn’t count.

Nor do pens. I’m not sure if you know this or not, but it’s never wrong to steal a pen.

And it’s not always your fault, either, the stealing. I mean, I inadvertently stole one of Matt’s CDs, but it’s only because I borrowed it and forgot to give it back. And that’s been since…well, he moved to DC in 2001, so…oh whatever. Point is: that’s not the same thing as out-right stealing.

This is, though:  I stole a pair of sunglasses, once…again, from a friend. Well, sort of. I didn’t like her all that much.  But she was a friend’s friend, which is the same as being so far removed from my Zone of Concern that she might as well have been missing, and…I don’t know, I guess that’s why I took them.

They were beautiful, large, ovalled, with a beige undertone. I still have them, in my car.

But, here’s the kicker: I can’t even wear sunglasses. I never have. I’d have to spend a fortune to because I require prescription glasswear. However, she got a little too tipsy, one evening as we lay out at the beach, and my being bored coupled with my seeing an opportunity to be aggravating, I took them.

Gas Light (1944). Starring Ingrid Bergman. It's also Angela Landsbury's first film role.

I spent the rest of that week gaslighting her. Making her think she was losing her mind, but trust me, she was no Ingrid Bergman.

To be sure, I am not claiming to be a kleptomaniac; I’m far too anxious a person for that hobby. Though I did know a former preacher’s wife who was one.

For years, I thought a kleptomaniac was someone who stuttered.

And I was amazed that she was being called one by the ladies at church. She spoke crisply and well. When one of these ladies’ purses ended up in the backseat of this woman’s car, though, the picture came a little more into focus for me.

Of course, that particular lady of the church was always losing things, come to think of it. Her keys, her patience, her lipstick, her older daughter. And I don’t really think that the former preacher’s wife stole all of those things. She only drove a Toronado, after all.

All I know for certain is that I didn’t steal them, either. Because that’d make eight items.

And I’ve only ever stolen four, like I told you, but – and here’s where you’ll be disappointed – I cannot for the life of me, right now, remember what that fourth thing was.

Hm.

Imagine that…

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Ok, well maybe a thimbleful is left of the mayonnaise.

The thimble in repose.

Ms. Frankie, the sweetest neighbor I had while growing up, God love her, thought it was because people really liked to look at the birds, that’s why they all had binoculars…and that anything other than Blue Plate was sacrilege.

She had a pair, herself, but they sat on the mantle after her husband died and became some sort of an un-dustable relic. And she was sort of correct, about the birds. Some people did really like to look at them. But, that’s only because they were in the way of the neighbor’s house.

Ironically, we had neighbors whose last name was Byrd.  But, they were good, God-fearing people. So, why spy on them? They also lived a little too far down the road.

My Uncle Jum kept his pair on the arm of his swivel chair. He went crazy eventually, so who knows what he saw when he looked through them. U.L. keeps his pair in the cabinet over the oven. But, I probably wasn’t supposed to tell you that.  Aunt Sally’s pair weren’t really binoculars. They held bourbon; the lens caps unscrewed to reveal, ta-da, circular-shaped flasks.

I learned this the hard way. As a child, visiting her in Texas, this was during my Dr. Who-meets-Sherlock-Holmes-and-Jem-Is-Truly-Outrageous-Truly-Truly-Truly-Outrageous phase. It was an awkward time for all, though, it didn’t really get me in trouble until we went to Idaho later that summer.

Anyway…I found her binoculars, oddly enough, in the liquor cabinet. She was nearing 100, so she didn’t bother to lock it anymore…what with “arthur” and all in her hands.

I took them outside, found something innocuous to stare at, like tree bark, something that didn’t really require binoculars, but then that’s not really the point of binoculars, is it?, to a kid…and when I lifted them to “mine eyes,” I poured bourbon, or it might have been liquid fire, straight onto my eyeballs.

“Arthur” apparently inhibited her ability to tightly screw caps back on things like binocular-flasks.

U.L., when he’s not waging some silent war of angry stares at the neighbor on the other side of the road (she sometimes forgets to wear pants when she mows the grass…so, cut him some slack), he actually enjoys bird-watching.

Not just any birds, either.  And never a jaybird. No, he likes to watch for the turkeys.  He particularly enjoys watching them in their frantic and mostly unrequited attempts at flight. Usually over the road.

On his acres of land live many creatures: coyotes (pronounced cow-yotes), racoons, deer (though they’re about to be put on the neighborhood Endangered Species list if they don’t stay out of his hosta), gray foxes (when they scream they sound exactly like an ingenue being murdered), and the lumbersome centerpiece of every Thanksgiving dinner: the wild turkey.

Maybe that’s what Aunt Sally drank.

This is not the pretty part of the turkey.

On a few occasions, when I’ve been back at home, he’s shown me these turkeys in repose, except they’re not at rest. I just like the word “repose.” And I have to be honest: when the falling sun hits their tail feathers, it’s a rather beautiful sight. The underwings of the turkey, as well, are quite purpled with irridescence. I found myself staring longingly after them through the binoculars. It didn’t even matter that they looked like turkeys.

Which are, you have to admit, an odd lot of birds. They have a vulture named after them, for crying out loud. And Ben Franklin…remember him?…tried to outvote the eagle in favor of the turkey for our national symbol of freedom.

Personally, I would have written in a vote, if I’d been there:  for the guinea.

Old Man Caser, and this had to be back when I was six or seven, lived across the road, directly in front of U.L.’s house. He was a nice man if “different,” (as in when his wife died, he didn’t tell anyone, and so there she stayed in the chair up against the front parlor window – also, I met his sister, after he fell in his house from a heart attack. He died. But, get this, so had his sister, like almost ten years earlier, back in 1978. I’ll save that story until Halloween. Nana was there, with me, that time, but she’ll never admit it. Never).

Old Man Caser had a hobby of collecting guineas. He had over the years, until the county took them all away (the ones that cars didn’t take out from running over them, that is), varying numbers of guineas…but never fewer than thirty, I would imagine, at any one time.

He had a great deal of land on his side of the road, and on that land were many, many trees, but the guineas seemed to prefer the most dangerous one: the water oak that grew over the road. Right by the mailbox.

I’m not sure, but they might be the dumbest birds that have ever lived. (And they didn’t live long in our small church community of loose youth in love with drag racing and little old ladies in Cadillacs).

From the top of the water oak, they got a pretty good look at the inside of U.L.’s kitchen, and I don’t know why, but they were forever trying to cross the road to get into it. I used to think it’s because he has such a large picture window over the kitchen sink, and the way his house is designed, with larger picture windows framing the den (these windows go all the way to the ground), it appears, at least to birds, that they can swoop down and fly through it. 

Or, they could have just wanted some cornbread dressing.

I buried probably, like, a million birds as a child, though, because of those windows…birds that had lost their lives to the glass-trickery that was U.L.’s kitchen-and-den architectural combo. Heck, I’d even walked into the windows, myself. Now, add to that, the fact that from the southside of the den looking toward the kitchen are three identical doors, each right after the other: one to the carport, one to the utility closet, and another to a separate part of the yard, out back of the house. People came to visit and stayed a whole extra day because they couldn’t figure out to leave the house. 

Anyway…so, we’d be sitting there quiet as can be, watching Wheel, or Lawrence Welk (please note that I never watched Lawrence Welk, but family time was family time, period), and Whomp!

Into the shrubs would fall another bluebird, or cardinal, and one time, a very angry, disillusioned cat.

But nothing whomps a window quite to the same tune as an 8-pound guinea trying as eagerly as the turkey to get off the ground.  Even without taking flight, a guinea with a well-intentioned run can kill itself by hurtling face-forward into plate glass.

This particular unfortuante guinea hit the window so hard it dropped an egg. 

Yet, I was fascinated by them. The best part, I think, was how loud they were. I mean, these are some noisy fowl. They were quite handy when company you didn’t prefer came over. All you had to do was pretend to be very interested in working in the yard, and after a few minutes, most of the time, the company just got tired of talking over the flock, and left.

Oddly enough, it looks a little like a turkey.

Thankfully, the guineas never really did anything by themselves…ever.  Every now and then, one might cross the road alone, but he always went back to the tree with the rest of them, if he didn’t get caught under the tires of a Buick. And, I mean, one could make some noise, by itself, I imagine, but you really needed the whole kit and kaboodle to get that delicious cacophony.

It’s an unusual childhood memory, I’ll give you that…and there’s a lot more attached to it, but still, I miss those birds. I miss nothing about their avian qualities, per se, but they were a definite freedom-encouraging symbol of my upbringing: make your own kind of squawk, but keep your family near; live on the edge but keep to the shade of the tree, you know cliche things like that.

I told Amanda and Erin that these fowl had impressed their birdy ways onto my core, my psyche, and because of them, one of my grown-up dreams was to, one day, own a small publishing firm. I said I was thinking of calling it The Guinea Tree Press, and just as I was about to show them the logo I’d put together on Adobe Illustrator, Amanda informed me that “guinea” was an ethnic slur against Italians. So, probably, I’d want to re-think my name.

I just looked straight at her, and then straight ahead, and you know what I did?

I said, “Damn.” I’ll have to go back through all my of my childhood and wipe it clean with a politically correct cloth because, all my life, I had no idea about the history of the word “guinea” as a slur.

Plus, now I’m worried sick that “hoop cheese” is next on the list.

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Caffeine: my new frenemy.

I guess it’s just “what I do” before I teach class, to get in the “zone,” with today’s youth. I think that’s what I tell myself: it’s caffeine; you’ll need that. These students have never lived without computer access. Email was “old-hat” by the time they were born. You’ve got to keep up with them. Caffeine is your friend. 

But, I rarely get the kick I need from the caffeine in a Diet Coke. Mostly, I just get gas.

Today, right in the middle of my lecture on trochaic feet in poetry, I burped. It was so long it was almost a sentence.

It was also loud. I had no idea I had it in me to sound “like one of the boys.”

I do.

I scared myself, though. I didn’t sense a burp coming, ahead of time. I mean, somehow, this entire summer term, I’ve managed to drink a Diet Coke, every morning, and control the acquired gas that often accompanies the carbonation.

That changed, at 8:49 AM.

And so did something else: my belief that every person in this country is full of good intentions. (Well, to tell the truth, they didn’t happen at the same time. I was just being dramatic. To be more exact, the change in “my belief that every person in the country is full of good intentions” occurred, closer to, like, 7:50 AM).

I’d never noticed this before. I guess I was always more interested in putting money in the vending machine (again, it’s not really an interest of mine as much as a necessity if I actually intend on getting the Diet Coke). But, I rarely looked at the slot where your coins go other than to make sure I wasn’t dropping coins on the floor.

Because that’s a real hassle, isn’t it?  Never have I loved a nickel so much as when it has rolled out of reach, under the behemoth that is the Coke Machine in the lounge.

For some reason this morning, though, I paid a bizarre amount of attention to my ritual of depositing coin after coin down Herman’s throat. (Herman, that’s his name, I pretend I’m feeding him, and that he doesn’t like anyone else but me. I get mad when others feed him, too – it’s the little things that get me through my day. God knows, I owe Herman).

Anyway, so when I’d placed my last coin, it was a dime, into the slot, I noticed a flashing sign, if you will, underneath the slot. Right below it. Black screen with those menacing red dots that light up, you know?  I hate those flashing signs the most.

They are never consistent, those flashing signs: sometimes their shapes are a jumble of lower-case and capital letters. That drives me crazy. And sometimes…sometimes! they look like the shapes of numbers that are trying to “pass” as letters. We used to do that on our calculators, in sixth grade, on the old interface that calculators used to have, remember? You could type in 55378008 and spell “boobless.” Mrs. Cotten was never amused at that. I only did it once and never again. I couldn’t; she took my calculator. She probably still has it, too.

Yeah, she's looking at you. And she's not happy.

Now, here I am, twenty-some-odd years later and I’m standing in front of a flashing sign, with those red lights, making me think of fifth grade, which I didn’t appreciate.

It read: “Press.” I was intrigued, but not shocked.

Then, immediately after, it read: “Bend down.”

I wasn’t entirely sure I’d seen that last part. Because I wasn’t even sure what it meant, exactly, so I bought another Diet Coke, and sure enough, after the last coin, this one was a nickel, was inserted…there flashed the “instructions.” Again.

I figured out that that must be what they were. Instructions. Telling me to press and then bend down.

Press and Bend Down.

I don’t know if it was the heat (it was over 90, again, today, and we’re still a week or two away from True Summer), or if it was the fact that I’m actually adjusting to teaching at 8:00 AM in the morning – perish the thought – but I was immediately offended at this vending machine. (Herman, why?)

I know how to get a blame Diet Coke out of one, thank you. I don’t need to be told to Press and then Bend Down.

My first thought was this flashing sign was the result of some lazy idiot, one afternoon, who stood around trying to think of a way to squeeze a few dollars out of our lawsuit-riddled capitalist economy. Though, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how one would go about suing Coke for “negligence for withholding liquid despite the obvious.” I mean, surely to god, they’d know how to retrieve a soft drink from a vending machine.

They’d hear it roll down the chute if nothing else. They’d have to be deaf not to.

That’s when I finally got the full foot all the way into my mouth. Obviously, this is why the machine flashes a sign. Right? I told myself that as a means to explain away the ridiculousness of having a sign flash at all, on a vending machine.

And it doesn’t matter that we have no deaf professors in that department, either.

I unscrewed the cap off, took a long, satisfying sip, and sat down to finish grading a few papers. But, I couldn’t push my first thought far enough to the side of my brain, and trust me if you’ve already gotten idiocy on the brain, grading Comp. II papers isn’t going to help you much.

Because I knew, I had convinced myself, already, that there was another, probably more genuine and legally-bound reason for such “instructions” to be progammed into a vending machine. Poor Herman, the number of idiots he must have to put up with everyday. The ADA was just a cover; what Coke was disclaiming was the fool who would think he’d been robbed because he paid for a Coke but couldn’t find it.

There are dumb people all around us, and somebody somewhere would have found a way to take advantage of this had a flashing sign not been ready and waiting to alert the consumer that it would take just a little more than one arm’s elbow grease from putting a few quarters in the machine to get their Coke, or Dasani water.

They were going to have to bend down, too. (Is knee grease a term, as well, or is it just disgusting to think about?)

Other signs own up to this testament on every product. I know you’ve seen them. They’re both a sad commentary on the state of affairs in America today, and also, they’re funny.

Board games like Life and Monopoly, are forever warning us that game pieces are for the game not our mouths. Coffee filters are constantly reminding us that the plastic wrap around the filters is “not a toy;” toilet paper’s kind enough to tell us this, too, and further, that if we put the plastic wrap on our heads, we will probably suffocate to death. 

Baby seats are doubling up, more than ever, on their duties to make sure we read on the box that “children have to come out of the car” with us by “unbuckling the straps that have been securely placed under the child’s arms” when we get to Wal-Mart; they can’t stay in the backseat, alone, even if you’ve got a portable DVD player. Hair dryers are absolutely dead-set against the idea of blowing your hair into a perfect Farrah Fawcett, or chicken wing, while bathing. 

A hair style and supper.

My favorite, still to this day, is the simple, age-old phrase: Some assembly required. (I like it so much because it’s an equal-opportunity instruction…found on boxes ranging from Big Wheels to Lego castles to Target bookshelves that look like ladders when assembled - and it’s also a little sweet in the way it offers its suggestion. Only “some” assembly is required; it’s like they attempted to take a small amount of pity on us, the consumers, and put some of it together, but then gave up after a few minutes. Just like we do when trying to learn how to program our DVR).  

I’m not the first to ask this, I know, but I bet I’m the first to put it the whole question in bold: Where did “common sense” go?

You get 5 bonus points if you guess Corporate America…and 5 more, if you say it’s in the top desk drawer of that little man in the back corner whose job it is to design the Warning labels about the plastic wrap, game pieces, and hair dryers.

And I bet his name is Herman. It’s just a feeling I have.

Or, maybe that’s gas, again.

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