Thief

The Glue of Regret

Regret glues you to the past — Not a good place to be

Probably more than anything else, regrets will not leave you alone or let go of you easily. In my experience, once they have tracked you down and have a hold on you, they jealously maintain it.

As if they have claws, these insomniacs. Regrets. Teeth.

Mind drinkers, ravagers.

I have a host of them, the size of a small army — well, at least they make a din about that size. Pointing fingers. Tut-tutting away at me, especially when I’m not looking. Illustrating all my imperfections, my transgressions, insanities, truly awful behavior.

Yes, a small army is about the size of them.

Choosing but one of my many regrets — if I, say fairy-godmother style, could un-do one of them one (not three, which I’m sure Scheherazade would have allowed; no, just the one. Choosing but one that I now never did. It did not happen. Was never there to regret. Which one? And there’s no changing my mind once I’ve selected, mind you.

Well…

I was a thief.

A prolific one.

No, I cannot un-do all my little thefts, all my little (and one not so little) liftings. Just the one.

I know the one.

The one that made my mother cry.

Although I knew both my mother’s and father’s mothers (Mom’s Dad fled the scene early and was never heard from again, and Dad’s Dad had passed before I was born), I don’t really know how they were raised. But I know of one result: both Mom and Dad considered stealing the worst of all possible crimes. Being a thief, said my dad, was lower than the lowest. Nothing could possibly bring more shame on a family, e.g., Mom and Dad, than stealing, than my stealing, than me being a thief.

A thief.

Me, I just could not see that. Surely hitting someone, hurting someone, killing someone (even if accidentally — I have the incident in mind), betraying someone, surely that was worse than the little transgressions I was mea culpa of.

Yes, technically speaking, they were all thefts, and as technically, I was a thief. But cents? At most — at most a dollar; except that one watershed bordering-on-grand-larceny lifting which was my grand finale, my hundred-dollar swan song — probably a thousand bucks in today’s money. Not a penny after that one. I think the amount might have scared me straight, as it were.

But really, I settled for pennies, or, as I said, a dollar at most. Didn’t bankrupt anyone. Perhaps inconvenienced some, if that dollar bill you were looking for in your wallet to pay the milk no longer was there. But, really?

Yes, really. But that was both my mom’s and dad’s view. Thief was the ugliest word in the entire Swedish Language (well, tjuv, was the Swedish version of that outrage).

Although: I must admit that what I lacked in per-theft value, I made up for in sheer theft-volume. If they were not nailed down, I was free to arrange a new ownership of those pennies, of that dollar — that was my ongoing philosophy (and, in some dim way, justification).

Each time, Dad got mad, sometimes really mad, and I received a few this-will-hurt-me-more-than-you spankings along the way. Mom got upset, too, but never this upset.

I had nicked (let me note that the word “stealing” has more euphemistic synonyms than just about any other word in the English language) a dollar from one of my dad’s employees. Took it out of his wallet in the changing room when no one was there. It was the last dollar (five kronor bill) in that wallet, so it wasn’t like it was going to go unnoticed.

I should also add that five kronor then (we’re talking early 1960s) was worth maybe ten dollars in today’s money, but even so, no grand larceny here.

Of course, the guy noticed the thing missing soon enough and told my dad — who knew it was me who’d done it, of course. He asked me point blank. I denied it equally blank. So, then Dad, more for show than anything else I gathered afterwards, asked his other employees if they had. No. No. And No.

Off the hook then, seemingly, until Dad told me he was going to fire the one employee (other than me) that he suspected. At which point, me the compassionate hero, who would not see an innocent man punished for my misdeed, stepped and owned up.

Dad sent me home. “Tell you mother,” he said. Implying that he could not face telling her.

So, home I went. Told her. And she broke down in tears. “How am I ever going to face them again?” was her question. The guy, and his wife, were very good friends of my parents. Indeed, the wife was probably Mom’s best friend.

“How am I ever going to face her again? Now that she knows that I have a thief for a son.”

A thief for a son.

Yes, that’s the regret I’d like un-regretted. That’s the lifting I would like to see un-lifted. It’s the one transgression that hurt another human being the most, I believe.

And perhaps that is the scale we should measure our transgressions by.

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© Wolfstuff