So, hi. My name is NGS and I shoplifted a bottle of super glue once. But let me back up.
Remember my Uncle Lenny and Aunt Debbie? The ones who took their nieces and nephews, including me, on a canoe trip and lost their keys in the river? The ones who took me camping for the first time? The ones I love more than life and want to be like? Well, they also took us to the beach once.
My cousin, J (I have to protect her identity) and I were teenagers (15? 16? 17?). Who knows? I am leaning towards the younger side of that because I had no money. No money. My parents shipped me off to Uncle Lenny and Aunt Debbie without so much a cent.
We were renting a lovely beach house on the Outer Banks. We were told, Jess and I, that we could share a room if it looked exactly the same when we left the house as when we entered the house. This detail is quite important. Because, I'm not kidding you, the first thing we did was pull out a dresser drawer to unpack and the dresser drawer fell apart in our arms.
We were so nervous we were going to get in trouble. Me because it's just the sort of thing that would send my father into a spiraling fit of rage and J because she had a history of behaving in less than a perfect way. So we pretended nothing was wrong, didn't let anyone into our room, and sneaked out that night, said we were "going for a walk," and walked right into a hardware store, and, with some carefully constructed plans, stole a bottle of super glue.
We went home and (after many tears and wrongly assembled wood strips) managed to glue the wood back together, put the drawer in the dresser, and then we lived out of our bags for the rest of the trip never so much as touching that damn dresser again. And I've never told a soul about our little adventure until just this moment.
I have stayed awake at night feeling so guilty over this story. I stole from a store. I'd send them money if I had any idea what the store was called. I lied to my aunt and uncle. I know (now) that they would have understood if we'd just told them what was going on. I know that lots of us did worse things than this when we were young, but this really has traumatized me. I was living a life of crime.
But I think I'm going to stop obsessing over this now. And focus on things I should feel bad about from now on.
Once my parents left my brothers and I alone with the strict instructions that the house be as clean or cleaner when they got home.
ReplyDeleteWe were suitably terrified at this warning.
I went to pull a movie off the shelf and the entire bookshelf collapsed. Six shelves full of VHS tapes, records, and magazines came crashing and clattering down.
The three of us sat there for the next two hours with Elmer's glue and tears, trying to glue that shelf back together, terrified of our parents' response.
I think they felt so guilty about scaring us that we never got a warning like that again.
Sorry for the comment hi-jack!