CHAT ABT
Matt came in. He said he’s been feeling suspicious. More and more, he said, his students are submitting things which, knowing their work the way he does, he suspects may have had ‘help.’
I knew what he meant. I watched someone being helped on my train back from Chicago just last week — a college girl on her split screen, merrily cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting, like she was glueing chicks for Easter.
It was hard to believe, and a little uncomfortable to think about her parents somewhere, footing the bill/shouldering bonkers debt for all that ‘education.’
Both my cousins are professors as well, and they – like Matt – are having to develop a nose for deceit.
“You get a little whiff of it,” Edward said. Like the strange air that settles over the dinner table when there’s a lie in the room, “You pick it up.”
Aside from a shipping crate’s worth of penny chews (over time!) from Mr. Williams’ sweet shop, and an eye pencil last week from Target (!), I’ve only ever stolen some binoculars. They were begging to be pinched — sitting there in a holster while some opera gonk screeched on and on. The fluff in the ears of the man six rows away was a lot more interesting.
Me and my pals were “up in the gods,” closer to heaven – ’though no more angelic. I was swinging those binoculars around, zooming in on nostrils and lobes. And then I tucked them in my satchel.
Because I had big plans for those things: Mr. Daisy across the road, futzing with his moths in the moonlight, Alexander Hissink feeling boobs in his mum’s sky-blue Renault 4. Someone in a kitchen, someone in a bra in a kitchen… Interesting world out there.
But my dad ripped me a new pair of binoculars, and he withered my soul. Nothing new, except that what he said to me that night after he’d taken it upon himself to rummage in my private belongings, has stayed with me my whole life. It rang in my ears on the Texas Eagle’s milk run from Chicago to St. Louis as I watched that train scholar commanding ‘c’/commanding ‘v.’ And it rang in my ears just now when Willy asked where the last square of Christmas Cadbury’s went.
My father — pursuant to the teachings of his mentor, T. Berry Brazelton — was measured in his response: Kind yet firm.
“Stealing destroys you.” he said. And then, further clarification: “Deceit is a close cousin to death.” He was already grabbing his keys. And we took the binoculars back.
Besides the swirls in the opera house carpet, I don’t remember much about that white-hot moment. I surely said “I’m sorry” to the old gal who came out from behind glass to receive the returned plunder, and maybe I even cried a bit. And it’s really only now that I see that scene with binocular clarity. I was saying sorry to the wrong person. I was facing the wrong way.
AB -14.2.24