November, 2012

Conscience Is The Inner Voice That Warns Us When Somebody Is Looking

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A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. (Steven Wright)

A person with no children says, "Well I just love children," and you say "Why?" and they say, "Because a child is so truthful, that's what I love about 'em - they tell the truth." That's a lie. I've got five of 'em. The only time they tell the truth is if they're having pain. (Bill Cosby)

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We do holidays big time in the Mallard household.

Our first family Easter was April 12, 2009. Lexi was 7 months old and already owned enough stuffed animals to open an apocryphal zoo—but that didn't stop her extended family from adding on to the list. By the time she hits third grade, I figure we'll have to build on a wing for the creatures.

Charlie went a different route. Miss Easter Bunny entered the house that Sunday lugging a basket almost as tall as she was and crammed full of all sorts of sweet treats.

"Charlie, honey," I said, fighting a rising panic. "Lexi can't eat things like jellybeans and robin's eggs."

Bless her heart, she didn't give me a 'how stupid do you think I am?' look. "Don't worry, Aunt Sandy. It's all chocolate, and I know she can have chocolate. And most of it's hollow chocolate, so it can be broken into small bits that will melt in her mouth. The solid ones we can chop up to little bits." She gave me a bright smile. "I'm sure she won't mind if you assist her in eating the contents."

Good. Because if she expected Lexi to eat it all on her own, she'd be working on that basket until she entered kindergarten. (Most of it ended up being frozen. We (we!) finished it by mid-summer.)

Lexi missed Halloween of '08 mostly because I said it was insane to take a one-month-old baby out trick-or-treating. Ducky backed me up, but both Abby and Charlie went into a blue funk. Halloween '09 we got beaten down; the four of them went out as the Andrews Sisters (Ziva was the third sister; Charlie dragged the treat bag and provided the third part harmony for Lexi) and brought back quite the haul. ('Laverne' and 'Maxene' actually sang "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" for a few people; 'Patty' just laughed, clapped and yelled, "More!" She didn't quite get the concept of lip-synching.) They spent the evening swapping out treats so that Lexi didn't get anything she might choke on.

Christmas? The first couple of years I didn't even bother buying any candy. Lexi's stocking (from us) held toys—but the stockings from (again) Abby and Charlie were crammed with candy. (Her second Christmas we were still working on Halloween stuff in the freezer!)

By April 4, 2010, I figured she was ready for an Easter egg hunt. We dyed eggs in the kitchen—screamingly electric colors that wouldn't blend in with ANYTHING around them (I didn't want to make it too hard—the kid was only a week shy of 19 months)—and kept the hunt downstairs so that Grandma could help. It took a while, but they finally found all twelve eggs. Lily and Ev had counseled Charlie on the concept of "going overboard" and she decided to go non-food: toys, books, coloring books and so on. Phew. (Gave us a chance to have the Christmas candy zeroed out by the time Halloween rolled around again.)

What I didn't realize at the time was that she passed that candy-giving mantle to me.

I didn't go too crazy the next Easter. But when she was three and a half and was begging for more eggs to hunt and I had had a hard time finding things to make with just a dozen hard-boiled eggs the year before, I started noticing the plastic eggs on display at the market. How ingenious! But… finding a hollow egg was kind of boring. (At least with the hard-boiled egg you could get an egg salad sandwich for lunch.) But—hey! Instead of filling the basket with candy, fill the eggs with candy and then dump it into the basket. I grabbed pastel eggs, primary-color eggs, striped and dotted eggs, glittery eggs, marbleized eggs, tie-dyed eggs, a threesome of giant golden eggs (perfect for hiding money), pearlized eggs… realizing I had to fill them, I started looking more closely at the candy display.

Hawaiian Punch flavored jellybeans? Oh, heck, yeah. (One bag for her, one for me.) Fruit jellybeans, spicy jellybeans, tangy jellybeans… Robin's eggs—oh, they have tiny ones and big ones now. Get one of each. Hummingbird eggs. Jellied candies shaped like chicks and bunnies. Itty bitty sugar cookies shaped in Easter shapes and frosted pink and white. Easter candy corn (multiple tri-colors, multiple flavors—including the old traditional one). Foil-covered chocolate eggs—plain, crunch, mint, filled with peanut butter or caramel: one of each. Chocolate coins with bunnies stamped on the foil. Peeps and chocolate covered Peeps. Pez dispensers! Sugar eggs with panorama scenes inside. A spring garden of flower-shaped suckers. Chocolate-covered marshmallow eggs. The list went on… and let's not forget the Easter M&Ms and pastel foil covered chocolate Kisses, right?

"Did you leave anything in the store?"

"Well… they were all so darn cute!"

Ducky shook his head. "We've filled the eggs to capacity and you still have enough for a dozen more baskets."

"Two. Three, tops," I corrected. I looked at the debris on the table. "Maybe four."

With careful work, we managed to open the filled eggs, cram a few more goodies inside and then snap them shut again. (A few had to be reinforced with tape. They're prettier than they are study.) But we still had fistfuls of chocolates and other treats.

Dealing with the chocolate was easy: freezer. The jelly beans and other candies were something else. Since they were opened and unwrapped, no charity would take them. I didn't want them at the store, and I couldn't imagine anyone noshing on them in Autopsy. I wanted my one bag of Hawaiian Punch beans; beyond that, I was good. "Oh, hey, I have an idea…"

For my birthday, Ducky had given me a beautiful cut glass container of—don't laugh—caramel popcorn. (There's only one place you can get it—the revival movie theatre in Herndon. The owner's mother makes the stuff by hand every morning and they sell out by the second showing that evening. One taste and you're hooked; it's so good, you want to kick the Cracker Jack building.) The popcorn was gone in a couple of days (and, at that, I was stretching it out), leaving me with a beautiful glass jar about a foot square with faceted diamond shapes and a pyramid-shaped lid with a diamond-shaped knob at the top.

I snatched it from its usual resting place, atop the baby grand where it caught the afternoon sun and made a glittering light show for the cats (Pyewacket had retired from the store not long before; he had leaped from one bookcase to another, missed (badly), and lost a leg after several surgeries; he got along quite well, but it was unfair to subject him to the not always kind attentions of oft unattended children). It took the better part of two hours to arrange, but the candies were crammed in artistically to make a sun on one side, moon on another, sunset on a third and sunrise on the fourth. The remaining candies were middle filler—and when I say crammed, I mean crammed. An earthquake couldn't dislodge them. And, showing through the cut glass of the jar, it made a sort of stained glass effect and the topper to the lid still reflected the light for the cats.

Back to the piano it went… to sit.

Spring became summer, summer became fall. Lexi turned—holy cow!—four. The house and yard were overrun with crazed preschoolers, all in awe of Lexi's "really, really old grandma" (one little boy said something about her really, really old mom and dad and I managed to not pop him one), the cats hid in the basement, the dogs hid under Mother's bed and, after the third cup of punch was spilled in the living room (despite instructions that food was to stay in the backyard, please!) I gave in to my baser instincts and said, "Toldja so." (Ducky had wanted to bring the good rugs down from the attic, now that Lexi was a more responsible age. I told him he was nuts, remember how much it cost to clean after the Xmas blowout of '07? I enjoyed that 'I told you so.')

Barely a week later I noticed something odd about the jar of now-ancient candy. The lid was gone. And at least an inch of by-now-very-firm jellybeans and jellied candies had disappeared. It had all been there during the party (I had hidden it during the party—I didn't want someone eating the contents by mistake); now it was depleted.

Hmm. Let's go through the list of suspects. Suzy? She knew how old the stuff was and wouldn't touch it on a bet. Ducky? Same. Lily, Ev, Charlie? Ditto. Mother wouldn't have been able to lift the lid, even if she had paid notice to it. I sure wasn't guilty. Only one logical suspect…

I got my answer without even looking hard. The inverted lid made a nifty bowl, and if you took the Misty books on one side and the Anne of Green Gables on the other and stuck long-abandoned chubby "baby' books in the valley between, it made a pretty good balance for the bowl full of really old candy.

Lexi was parked on her beanbag chair, eating the snack I had allowed her to take upstairs and working her way through one of the Ramona Quimby books. She didn't even notice I had walked in until I squatted down next to her. Then she looked up, stuck a carrot stick in the book as a placeholder and gave me a disarming grin. "Hi, Mommy. What's shakin'?"

I ignored the lingo (god knows where she had picked it up) and opened the book. "Carrots are not bookmarks."

"It won't hurt the carrot."

"It will hurt the book." I reached up to her desk and grabbed a piece of cardstock with the library sale dates on it and stuck it in the book. "There's a reason you bring these home from the library, you know."

She nodded enthusiastically. "To tew us when the saows are."

"And to hold your place in a book. Treat books with respect, Lexi. Don't dog-ear pages, don't—' Dang it, I came up with a different lecture in mind. "Lexi, the big jar of candy on the piano, the one that's just for decoration, with the really old candy in it? It's been opened." Silence. "Someone took a bunch of candy out of it." Silence. "And the lid is missing." Deafening silence. "Do you know anything about it?"

Big rule in our house: if you do something that you've been told is a no-no, you will be punished. If you do something you've been told is a no-no and are asked about it and choose not to confess (and/or lie like a rug about it), your punishment will be worse because you compounded your crime with falsehood. "No, Mommy."

One more try. "There are, realistically, only eight people who could have taken that candy. Grandma isn't strong enough to open that jar. Suzy wouldn't have taken it. Daddy and I wouldn't have taken it. Auntie Charlie wouldn't, Auntie Evvie wouldn't and Auntie Lily wouldn't. Who's left?"

"Maybe… maybe Uncow Jethro?" I gave her a, 'yeah, right' look. "Uncow Ray? Auntie Barbie?"

I sighed. "Lexi…" I hate to say, it wasn't so much the fib that was getting me—it was the fact that she thought I was so stupid I'd buy it.

"Cooper? Cooper wuvs candy."

Well, that was true enough. "And how did he open the lid?"

Crap. Missed that part.

"You know," I said conversationally, "that candy is awfully old. Someone could possibly get a stomachache. Maybe even get sick."

Her eyes widened. "How sick?" I shrugged expressively. "Do—do I have to go to the hospitow?"

"Are you telling me you're the one who opened the candy jar?"

Her brow knit, her eyes scrunched and she twisted and chewed her lips. The last time I saw a confession take so long and be the result of so much work, it was on CNN. I glanced "casually" toward the bookcase—and the missing lid.

Busted. "Yes, Mommy."

"Yes…?" I prompted.

"I took the candy."

"Why? We have a cookie jar full of suckers in the kitchen, Halloween chocolate in the freezer—if you ask, you have a reasonably good chance that Daddy or I will say yes."

"I didn't want a sucker. And I didn't want chocowat. I remembered how good they were at Easter…" She trailed off and looked at the bookcase. "They aren't so good, now." Her eyebrows almost tangled they were so drawn together. "Am I gonna die?" she whispered.

"No… and if you don't have a stomachache by now, you're probably okay. Now. You knew that jar was off-limits. You broke the 'ask first' rule. And then you lied. So. What do you think your punishment should be?"

She actually thought about it. "Wet the punishment fit the crime…" she muttered. (Thank god I had my hand up by my mouth to prop up my chin, made it easier to smother my grin and swallow my laugh. Mother is fond of Gilbert and Sullivan and Lexi watches/listens with her.) "No candy untiw Christmas?"

I was tempted to say yes, but— "Christmas is two months away…" Now she looked worried, probably concerned I would say 'yes.' "I think it would be reasonable to say no candy until Thanksgiving Eve."

"Okay!" Half a prison sentence? Sure, yes!

"Now. That takes care of nicking the candy. What about the fibbing?"

She sighed heavily. "Wines?" she said dejectedly.

"Lines." Old school is good school.

"How many?" I looked at her expectantly. "Twenty-five?" she asked hopefully. I stared at her blandly. "Fifty?" No answer. "Seventy-five?" Dwindling hope. "Hundred?"

"That works."

She sighed again and set aside her book. Dragging over to her desk she sat down and pulled out a pad of primer paper. "I wiwh not wie?"

"Well—you know the difference between a fib and a little white lie, right?"

"Tewwing Auntie Miriam I wuvved the sweater she knitted me is a white wie."

"Right. So you can write 'I will not lie' because you know the difference—or you can write 'I will not fib.' Same number of letters."

She sighed. "I wiwh not fib. I have to work on my f's and b's anyway."

"Good choice." I ruffled her curls and gave her a kiss so she knew we were still buddies. "I'll bring you a new plate. You're going to need it. And don't forget to number your lines."

She nodded. "Mommy?"

"Mmh?"

"Wiwh you throw out the candy?" She pointed to the bookcase. "Pwease?" she quickly added.

"You won't go back and nick it again later, will you?"

She made a face and a rude noise. "No."

"I'll put it back in the container. It's kind of pretty."

"Yeah, it is," she agreed. She turned to her paper and started writing.

All in all, a good ending—even thought it still bugs me that she thought I'd believe Cooper was guilty. It was a temptation to ask, "Do you really think I'm that stupid?"—but I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer.