Philately and Larceny

Last night, as I watched the Iowa caucuses in this year’s presidential election unfold, I had the melancholy thought that I will never be elected to the nation’s highest office. Not that I don’t have many sterling qualities and Great Ideas on how to improve the country. It’s just that – though perhaps a few of my friends may be shocked to hear it – I have a criminal record. One that goes back nearly fifty years.

What inspired me to break the law? Philately. Simply put, I was a stamp collector and at the tender age of 7 or 8 (I can’t recall) I decided to cut out the middle-man and start obtaining stamps from their source – the U.S. Mail.

Walking home from school one day with a classmate (nameless here, for obvious reasons) who was also a fellow philatelist (now legal in most states), we embarked on our cross-country spree.

I’m not sure whose idea it was, but halfway up Belvedere Drive from Strawberry Point Elementary School, we started investigating the contents of several residential mailboxes. Unfortunately, the stamps we found were not very interesting, since they were neither particularly old nor terribly foreign. Of course, it never occurred to us that the contents of the letters could have any other value.

Unimpeded, we continued on our search until a shout rang out from a nearby house. A man opened his front window and ordered us to Stop right there! Caught red-handed, we turned away from him and quickly stuffed the purloined letters under our shirts before he could reach the door. Naturally, neither one of us had the sense to just run for it, thus confirming my belief that most criminals are simply not that smart to begin with.

The man confronted us on the sidewalk and had us turn out our pockets. Whew!, I thought, we might just get away with it… Then his wife leaned out the window and yelled for him to Check under their shirts! (Darn you, Miss Marple!) After inquiring of our names and addresses, to which we gave honest answers (see observation on criminal intelligence in preceding paragraph), my partner-in-crime was taken to his house nearby and I was driven home to mine, nearly a mile away. The details are sketchy at this point, but I do remember crying non-stop, so I must have had a prodigious amount of tears at my disposal.

Back home, I was given an old-fashioned Talking-To and sent sobbing to my room. During dinner, there came a knock on the front door. My father answered it and I was Summoned. Behind him loomed a County Sheriff. Now I had never ever been this close to a policeman before and, at first, did not comprehend why on Earth he should be coming to our house (ah, the innocence of youth). Then, I suddenly connected the dots and the bottom dropped out of my world. I could practically feel the cold steel of his handcuffs snapping around my tiny wrists. (Did they make really handcuffs that small?) The three of us went into the back bedroom where I was to be Interrogated.

Astoundingly, all the sheriff wanted was to make sure that I understood how wrong my actions were (well, I did now, I replied in a tiny voice), that I was never to do anything like that again (no problem there, sniff) and whether my friend and I had destroyed or hidden any other mail prior to being caught (not that I could recall, suddenly being very cooperative), though I vaguely remembered stuffing an envelope or two into one of those drains that run from under the lawn into the gutter. Then he left, as unexpectedly as he had arrived.

I watched his sheriff car drive away down the street and slowly took in the fact that I was not going to “juvey” (a word spoken only in hushed and awed tones in school). Beyond my father having used the sheriff’s visit to scare me straight, I was more-or-less off the hook.

I suppose I could have used my easy escape from the arms of the law to propel myself into a Life of Crime, taking advantage of judges’ alleged reluctance to send first-time youthful offenders to prison. But I didn’t. I spent the rest of the evening in my room, alternately lamenting whatever mysterious forces had led to my astonishingly poor judgment and taking in the fact that I would not be going to the Big House.

I never did find out what punishment befell my companion, as the subject never came up again. We both appeared back at school the next day and went on with our lives, as if nothing had happened. None of our classmates ever knew, until now.

Not once did I imagine the shame my father must have felt that afternoon. Looking back, though, I can appreciate his wisdom in not flying off the handle and knowing how best to deal with his youngest child’s indiscretion. I’ll just have to add that to the growing list of things my father got right.