I just deployed this padlock in a typical around-the-house sort of application. I’d forgotten I still had it. I recently rediscovered it moving some things around in the garage.
It was new sometime in the second half of 1982. I told my mother I found it in the bushes of the apartment complex where we lived. In fact, I shoplifted it, probably from Winn-Dixie on 78 in Oxford (though I can’t remember exactly, and that bothers me because that’s the sort of detail I usually don’t drop).
I had a little kleptomaniac phase. It was after the biggest theft of my life, which I don’t consider part of the same thing. No, I’d just put something in my pocket once in a while, at the grocery store, the convenience store, or the five and dime. There weren’t really cameras anywhere but banks, so if you did a little policing for witnesses beforehand, it was pretty low-risk.
I took a pack of baseball cards once in a while, but that’s the only thing I really remember that I actually wanted. It wasn’t about having the item. It was about stealing it. I pocketed this lock. One time I remember stealing a fishing lure. (I didn’t even fish.) I might have done it ten times total, and it was never anything of particularly high value. It was just another manifestation of my transient mild sociopathy.
(That sociopathy also led me to lie to my parents frequently, and I don’t mean dumb regular kid lies. I thought I’d posted about that before, but I guess not. Another time.)
My parents had just divorced, and that meant (among other amenable factors) two households to play off one another. Also, the kid with whom I stole that $80 (linked above) wasn’t the most morally rigorous fellow, and my behavior tended to be significantly worse when I was with him and seeking his approval.
So, we’re responsible for our own actions, of course, but I would say those are the influences that channeled me momentarily into a life of crime and deceit. Hopefully the much straighter path I’ve walked for so much longer is sufficient mitigation.
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