Guilt

When I was in kindergarten we still exchanged Christmas gifts among students at school. Public school. You drew a name, and as long as it wasn't your own, you bought that classmate a gift up to an agreed upon amount. That year the gift exchange was a roaring success. I made out like a bandit - getting the Matchbox car of my dreams. A Ferrari.

There was, however, one classmate who was not so fortunate. A waif of a girl named Tammy was sick at home and wasn't there to receive her gift. Even worse, the teacher asked a certain young man to courier the present to Tammy's house on his way home from school. Me.

As I trudged through the snow with my friend Tim, it occurred to us that we didn't really need to deliver the gift. After all, who would know? (Remember this is kindergarten, not graduate school.) So we ditched the festively wrapped present in a snow bank and commenced a running snowball fight the remaining few blocks to home.

Fast forward one week. My mother calls me from my room to the kitchen.

"I just talked with your teacher. Weren't you supposed to have delivered a Christmas present to a certain someone last week?"

"Uh ..."

"Think real hard before you answer that question, young man."

"Uh ..."

"Let me show something."

She led me by the hand down the hallway to the coat closet. From behind the knit caps and scarves on the top shelf she produced an unopened box of 64 Crayola crayons. The box with the built-in sharpener! I had been coveting this cache of color for the past year, almost drooling every time I saw them on the shelf at the local dime store.

"This was going to be a present for you," she announced. "Instead, you'll be wrapping it up and taking it to Tammy."

My heart sank and my limbs became remarkably heavy, as if gravity had increased tenfold - just the way my Our Solar System picture book had described conditions on the planet Jupiter. It was my first encounter with the weight of guilt. I cried. It was a hard lesson. I'm sure it was tough on Mom, too.

I've felt guilt a time or two (perhaps more) since then. It comes on my whenever I do the thing I know I shouldn't - or don't do the thing I know I should.

Felt that old pang again today. I racked the bike to the front of the 77X and rode the bus home, and all the way to the park and ride my heart kept saying "you should be pedaling."

Amazing how far tough love and a box of 64 crayons can reach.

(Footnote: For you fact checkers - the Our Solar System picture book was wrong. The gravity on Jupiter is estimated to be about 2.5 times that of the earth. However, since Jupiter doesn't have a solid surface, you wouldn't have anything to stand on to experience this gravitational difference. Meaning you also couldn't pedal a bike on Jupiter.)