I discovered my conscience only after I became the milk money thief. My conscience, a flickering thing at the time, might have sparked some hesitation prior to my thievery, but a bicycle, just the glimmer of a bicycle, blotted out what little light my conscience may have cast upon the matter. It was pure arithmetic at the time: money = bike. Easy money = bike sooner. No algebraic variables to muddy to equation.
I was in the first grade, living on a cul de sac littered with boxy apartments buildings and inhabited by lots of kids, almost all of whom had bikes. I knew how to ride a bike and I was big enough to get a real bike, the kind with air in the tires, but my dad said I’d have to save up some of my allowance if I wanted a bike.
It was 1960 or thereabouts and I was allowed 25 cents each week. Gratis. I never remember having any chores. So it’s my parents’ fault that I never learned to earn and become righteous. For the bike, I had to save 10 bucks. I don’t know if I knew that meant 40 weeks of not spending so much as a penny at the penny candy store up the hill, but I did know two things: 10 bucks was more money than I could imagine and I’d never save up that much. And even if I could save it, winter was coming soon and there’d by no bike riding in winter. Cold. Wet.
It gnawed at little me. I had no imagination for solutions. Gnawing frustration visited, often in the form of tantrums and tears, when I saw other kids riding their bikes away, it seemed, from me, and off into a land of play for bigger boys. Sometimes they’d race around the cul de sac, around and around, passing my dejected countenance as I begged for a turn on this boy’s bike or that boy’s bike. But I knew that if I had a bike, no one but me would ride it because I wouldn’t be able to bear getting off it.
Usually, they just rode off, emptying the cul de sac of all the fun, leaving me there wondering what to do.
Bike!
Want bike!
Then one day, a wondrous thing happened. We were in our classroom, doing whatever first graders did in those days, and it started to snow. A rarity in Mississippi. Snow, quiet snow, in flakes yards apart, falling so quietly, like ash from the summer swamp burns, but each flake white as, well . . . snow. Snow! Falling, but slowly. Everywhere. So slowly. Had you ever seen anything fall so slowly and quietly? Sure, it didn’t stick, but . . . it’s snowing in Mississippi in November. Snow!
I wrestled with myself because it was surely beautiful, but it was also a bad sign. Winter in Mississippi didn’t burden us with snow, but our winters were cold, wet and windy – not bike riding weather – and snow, as transfixed as I was by its loveliness, meant winter. Now my gnawing bike anger was ruining even my ability to appreciate this wintry miracle outside.
All the kids ran to the window to draw and yell. “Can we go get a bunch?!!?” “What’s it taste like?” “Can we get some and draw ‘em?” “Will we be able to get home?” The teacher, Miss Mary, seemed as delighted as we were and I remember her laughing in a way that seemed so adult as if to say, “Well, I’ll be . . . .” She walked out of the classroom laughing. That I remember well.
Because that’s exactly when I saw the milk money. Money collected once a week from all the kids to buy the week’s supply of milk and graham crackers. Just sitting there in a big envelope. All the kids were at the window. The teacher gone. Gotta be 10 bucks in that fat envelope.
I took it. Snuck it into my little shirt and then into my satchel.
Later that day, walking home, I opened the envelope. There, the first bill I took, was a 10 dollar bill. I put that bill in my pocket and the envelope back into the satchel and I went home, presented it to my mother and said, “Let’s talk bike.” Or something like that.
“Where did you get this, Gregory?” my mother asked.
“Found it on the street.”
“You found it on the street?”
“That’s right.”
Well, I seem to recall she had a look on her face like she’d just thought of a new way to serve a chicken. A look of discovery and planning all at the same time.
“C’mon, lemme read you a story,” she said.
Sounded good to me. Life was all good now. Except it wasn’t all good because I felt as if a connection to my mother was strained to breaking. I didn’t feel badly about taking the money – didn’t give it a second thought yet! – but lying to my mom made my feel lonely somehow.
I sat next to her on that ratty brown sectional sofa and sunk as deeply into it as a little boy could while leaning, almost pushing, just as heavily into my mother’s right arm, just to reestablish or confirm a connection.
How I wish I could remember what she was reading. How I wish I could ask her. But she’s gone now and it was some 43 years ago. Doesn’t matter because I do remember not paying much attention to the story. Everything in me was a like a darkening sky troubled with swirling swamp ashes blown by a wind gusting this way and that, a wind that seems to sweep the air away making it hard to breathe. I felt born away from my own mother. I was aloft, torn away from a solid foundation and I began to sob. I pushed my head into something surely solid, my mother and everything motherly about her, and I sobbed.
At first, she just kept reading like she didn’t notice. Or like it was expected. “Well, now, what is upsetting you so?” she finally asked.
It relieved me, it settled me just to have the opportunity to tell her and to clear the skies in my heart. “Mom,” I sobbed. “I took that money at school.”
And that’s the day, without having a word for it . . . that’s the day I became acquainted with my conscience.
My mom presented it to me without a word and waited for me to discover and make use of it.
