Thinking
about politics lately has naturally led me to thoughts about lying.
Lying is one of those odious things that all of us have done at one
time or another, but that good people try not to do.
I
used to try to lie when I was younger, but I was never any good at
it. I always found myself getting in more trouble because of the lie
than I would have gotten in if I had just stepped up and had the
courage to tell the truth.
My
last big lying experience happened shortly before Fluffy and I got
married, when I got the bright idea to make a shadow box that told
the story of Fluffy and me to use as the photograph on our wedding
announcement. I have attached a picture of that shadow box here, just
to let you know that this was one of those “What were you
thinking?” ideas from the very inception.
Note the dark blue flowers in and underneath the pitcher.
At
the time, I thought this was just the coolest idea on the planet, and
Fluffy either agreed with me or he didn’t care enough about
what went on our wedding announcement to tell me I was crazy. So he
made the shadow box, and I found things to put in it that represented
our courtship.
You’ll
notice the picture of Fluffy and me, all decked out in Wild West
regalia even though neither of us had any interest whatsoever in the
Wild West. The wallpaper behind our picture is the wallpaper that was
in the dining room of the first house we owned. In my defense, the
wallpaper came with the house, but since I’m trying to be
honest in this column I need to confess that at the time I thought it
was beautiful.
Live
and learn.
There
is a section containing popcorn and Jujubes, along with movie stub
tickets to indicate our interest in movie-going back in those days.
There was an old stamp we found behind a wall in our new home, as
well as stamps and coinage of 1976. There were pictures of Fluffy and
me as little children. There were political campaign buttons. There
was a game token from a game that Fluffy and I created and that was
published by Bookcraft. There was a bunny, because even then Fluffy
and I had already adopted the bunny as our totem animal.
And
if you’ll look, there’s a tiny brass vase, filled with
tinier dried flowers. About a half dozen of them are a very dark blue
— a shade of blue that God apparently never intended to be a
flower color, because I’ve never seen a real flower that was
anywhere near that hue. The dark blue flowers are the focus of my
attention as I write this, because therein lies the tale.
I
don’t know where I got the little brass pitcher. It really
didn’t have anything to do with our courtship. I put it there
more because I needed to fill a particular space in the shadowbox
than for any actual reason. But if you’re going to have a
pitcher, you need to put flowers in it. At least, that was my
reasoning at the time.
I
went downtown to a huge craft store, looking for tiny flowers. There
I found them — those dark blue things you see in the picture.
There was only one problem. I only needed a few of them, and they
were being sold in a package that contained hundreds. I’d say
the diameter of the stems that were tightly tied together in each
bunch was a good three and a half inches. There were at least 500
flowers in each bunch, and probably two or three times that many.
I
didn’t want that many flowers, and I certainly didn’t
need that many flowers. And being without a job at the time, I
certainly couldn’t afford the $5.99 that bunch of flowers cost.
A price tag of $5.99 in 1976 would easily be — well, let’s
not estimate it. I found a website
that made the conversion for me. This is what I learned:
$5.99
in 1976 had the same buying power as $24.36 in 2012.
Whoa.
I had no idea there was that
much
difference. But you can see why I didn’t want to pay $5.99 for
more than 500 flowers when I eventually used less than ten of them.
So
I did what I thought was the reasonable thing to do. I marched up to
the checkout counter with the bunch of flowers and explained my
situation. I said I wanted just a few flowers for my wedding
invitation but I couldn’t afford the whole bunch, and I offered
to pay a quarter for just a dozen or so of them.
Whoever
purchased the bunch eventually wouldn’t miss the few flowers
I’d take, and the store would be 25 cents (which, according to
the website, is $1.02 in today’s money) richer.
Apparently
what I thought was logical was not logical in the mind of the
prune-faced granny behind the checkout counter. Instead of saying,
“Dear, nobody will even miss a few of those flowers,” she
scowled at me and said if I wanted any flowers I had to buy the whole
bunch. Period.
As
I went to take the flowers back to their place on the shelf, I
seethed. This was not
fair! So I rationalized that I would just take
the stupid flowers. And that’s exactly what I did. I think I
took ten of them. The bunch of flowers looked no smaller after my
thievery than they did before. Truth be told, I could have taken
fifty flowers out of a bunch that size and nobody would have been the
wiser.
I
put the flowers in my pocket and absconded with my treasure. I made
the shadowbox, and life was sweet. Except — well, except that
every time I looked at that shadowbox, all I could see were the
flowers I had stolen. I knew I was going straight to hell.
I
didn’t want to confess my sin. The way that store employee
acted, she would have pressed charges if I’d told her the
truth, and I would have ended up in jail. So I went all the way back
downtown, returned to the store, and compounded my thievery by lying
to cover it up.
Here’s
what I did. I took a quarter out of my purse, looked around the store
for a few minutes, and then took the quarter to the checkout counter.
“I found this on the floor,” I said.
If
I had given the quarter to the prune-faced granny who dealt with me
before, she would have taken that quarter so fast she probably would
have taken a finger or two with it. But as fate had it, Prune Face
was not there that day. The sweet granny who was at the checkout
counter instead broke into a huge smile.
“Oh,”
she said, “how sweet you are! Most people would have just kept
the quarter, and here you are bringing it to the checkout stand and
turning it in. It’s not often these days that you see honesty
like that. You just go ahead and keep that quarter as a reward for
your honesty.”
Bummer.
Try
as I might, I couldn’t talk her into taking the quarter. So I
walked around for a few more minutes and discreetly dropped the
quarter on the floor where somebody else (presumably a store
employee) would find it. Then I went home.
That
second lie didn’t make it any easier to look at the shadowbox.
My ill-gotten flowers are still there for anyone to see. But they
stand as a constant reminder to me that liars just don’t
prosper.
Ever
since my experience as a flower thief, I have done my best to stay
away from lying. I still have a problem with exaggerating, but when I
catch myself I back off fast. Maybe nobody will catch me if I lie. In
fact, probably
nobody will catch me. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ll
know it. And my opinion is the one that matters.
Kathryn H. Kidd has been writing fiction, nonfiction, and "anything for money" longer than
most of her readers have even been alive. She has something to say on every topic, and the
possibility that her opinions may be dead wrong has never stopped her from expressing them at
every opportunity.
A native of New Orleans, Kathy grew up in Mandeville, Louisiana. She attended Brigham
Young University as a generic Protestant, having left the Episcopal Church when she was eight
because that church didn't believe what she did. She joined The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints as a BYU junior, finally overcoming her natural stubbornness because she
wanted a patriarchal blessing and couldn't get one unless she was a member of the Church. She
was baptized on a Saturday and received her patriarchal blessing two days later.
She married Clark L. Kidd, who appears in her columns as "Fluffy," more than thirty-five
years ago. They are the authors of numerous LDS-related books, the most popular of which is A
Convert's Guide to Mormon Life.
A former managing editor for Meridian Magazine, Kathy moderated a weekly column ("Circle of Sisters") for Meridian until she was derailed by illness in December of 2012. However, her biggest claim to fame is that she co-authored
Lovelock with Orson Scott Card. Lovelock has been translated into Spanish and Polish, which
would be a little more gratifying than it actually is if Kathy had been referred to by her real name
and not "Kathryn Kerr" on the cover of the Polish version.
Kathy has her own website, www.planetkathy.com, where she hopes to get back to writing a weekday blog once she recovers from being dysfunctional. Her entries recount her adventures and misadventures with Fluffy, who heroically
allows himself to be used as fodder for her columns at every possible opportunity.
Kathy spent seven years as a teacher of the Young Women in her ward, until she was recently released. She has not yet gotten used to interacting with the adults, and suspects it may take another seven years. A long-time home teacher with her husband, Clark, they have home taught the same family since 1988. The two of them have been temple workers since 1995, serving in the Washington D.C. Temple.