Kleptomania

   Last Friday my 9^th grade daughter had her iPhone lifted out of her purse during PE class at school, and we spent the weekend doing things like filing a Police report, which was aided by the fact that the thief made a few calls to friends (including his Stepmother), all the phone #’s of which are readily listed on our online cell account. The Police have already identified the perpetrator and are now in touch with the school Administration, so we are hopeful for a retrieval and swift retribution.

 

    We have learned the student in question has a sketchy background, and I am naively wishful that his encounter with the Police and his family will have a deterring effect on his behavior of stealing. With the other influences in his life I can’t be fully optimistic about a life turnaround, but when I look back at my own life, quite untroubled in contrast to this teenager, I do recall going through my own experiments with shoplifting.

 

   Like most of us I have managed to push aside wherever that stealing impulse comes from and get on with an honest life. But to get to that place of maturity I went through a period in the summer before 8^th grade when my neighbor buddy and I experimented with shoplifting for about 2 weeks. I actually remember following it on the calendar because it started on a Saturday and continued for the next two weekends, coming to an end when we ended up at his parent’s beach house during summer vacation.

 

   I know this behavior came from puberty, and in our case it was not so much disrespect or destructiveness as experimenting and thrill-seeking. I have a goofy memory of my buddy picking up an erect broomstick and holding a bag of shoplifted items underneath his crotch like huge testicles, laughing ourselves silly as cars whizzed by along the mall entrance road. Puberty was making its grand announcement, and we were barely aware of it.

 

   We spent that entire Saturday coolly entering different stores each with a shopping bag and competing with each other to see if we could lift something without the other knowing. We relied on our previously sincere demeanor of innocence as we cruised breezily into each store, scoping out the awareness of the employees and making our call as we went.

 

   We never got collared that day, never got busted, and it was fairly amazing how well our luck ran. All the stuff we took was small in size: there was candy, a fridge magnet, a small bottle of cinnamon oil (very popular at our Jr High School), and other things, maybe 20 items between the both of us.

 

   The following week we went with my friend’s family to Mission Beach in San Diego for several days, and soon we were exploring the local beach shops and stores. This was 1972, I was discovering counter-culture at that time, and we happened to stop into this hippy-owned natural food store, hoping to see things I would never find at the mall. I chatted with the near 30-looking woman and learned that she owned the place with her husband. She was vintage Woodstock in culture and appearance, the real thing, and she and her husband had created a modest but sincere business based on their ideals. There was natural yogurt made from organic dairy, macramé vests and wall-hangings, and handmade leather items popular at the time.

 

   Then I spotted a cabinet located at the register containing little vials of extracts of different kinds, similar to the cinnamon oil, but interesting types you wouldn’t see anywhere else. As soon as I had gained the woman’s confidence, I made a move when she turned her back and slipped one vial into my pocket. She never knew it was me, and we said goodbye and were out of there.

 

   As we hurried back to the beach house the weather turned from sunny and idyllic to clammy and cloudy, and with that sudden cue of darkness I began to feel a tinge of guilt over my theft, a feeling I didn’t have from the mall spree. These shop owners were the most honest people I could name, they were living in the Age of Aquarius and I took it very seriously. People over 30 were to be distrusted; they had ruined this world with misplaced materialism and support for a bogus war, but these people were reinventing an honest business from the ground up, considering every resource and ideal in how they proceeded in an effort to eradicate their parents’ mistakes, and I had taken right from their pocket.

 

    I didn’t freak out over this, didn’t lose any sleep, I just pondered it with sad regret as the summer wore on and we returned home. In my bedroom I had made a shrine of all my stolen items on the dresser by my bed. I treasured each one and marveled how we had not been caught. But I decided this was to be a limited collection, not to be added to any longer. I made an informal pact to myself that the vial of Pine oil was the last thing I would ever take, and I would come to use that totem to draw the line between what I had done (mostly forgiven) and what I might do again (taking things no longer being OK).

 

   All the little stolen items were discarded as the years went by, but the Pine oil went into my Memory Box, my treasure box of totems and power objects from my childhood and teenage years that I still have today. My kids go through this box all the time, and through their curiosity and amusement the Pine Oil vial has re-emerged into the light of day, sitting incidentally on my dresser. It’s a friend, casually hanging around like a supposedly indifferent cat when you pull into the driveway.

 

    I have a hunch my daughter’s iPhone has no relationship whatsoever to the Pine oil vial, but if her cell phone does come back to us through the pursuit of the local Police, I hope this teenager will find some truth somehow after the full weight of the law (and his Stepmother) has been delivered.