It’s true; I was once among the ‘Children of the Corn’

A while back I wrote a column detailing the nefarious criminal activities of my youth; namely, the theft from Cook’s Five and Dime of a penlight and two Spiderman comics. I was in fourth grade.

Apprehended by store security, I was turned over to the tender mercies of my old man. He didn’t ask me why I did it, didn’t make an appointment for me to see a counselor, didn’t ask a pediatrician to prescribe Ritalin. He did not wail and gnash his teeth, wondering where he and my mother had gone wrong.

He dragged me home and walloped the portions of my body usually associated with sitting until I no longer could. I did not steal again.

Except once.

It was the August following my foiled “flashlight caper.” I was as old as a kid is in fifth grade—a kid who flunked fourth grade the first time around, I mean.

My family, the whole troupe, was visiting my Grandma Seeley’s house, what we at the time called “the farmhouse,” despite the lack of an attached farm. Grandma’s house was sort of out in the country—what we city kids thought of as the country, anyway.

The visit followed the usual Sunday afternoon custom: mom and grandma in the kitchen putting up a big picnic lunch; dad, grandpa and Uncle Ray sitting around the back yard drinking tea, beer or whiskey; sisters and cousins pulling weeds from grandmother’s garden while my brothers foraged for nubbly toads beneath the rhubarb plants crowding thick along the side of the house.

I spent the afternoon as I often did, tramping through the nearby woods, carrying an old pillowcase in which to stash interesting pine cones, sparrow skulls or caterpillars. I was only ten minutes into my hike when the woods petered out and something I had never before imagined unfolded like a green and gold curtain before my eyes: an entire field full of corn, just growing wild!

I had always assumed corn was manufactured pretty much like everything else—in a Newark factory or possibly somewhere in Japan. To find it—and in such abundance, just growing out of the ground—well...I immediately set about filling the pillowcase with ear after ear of the free corn.

The scant biceps on my skinny arms stood out as I lugged the pillowcase back to the house.

There, to my surprise and dismay, I was chastised mightily for perpetrating such a heinous transgression and lectured on the dangers inherent in stealing from farmers. (It turns out farmers grow corn on purpose with the intent of selling it.) I was warned about the horrific afterlife awaiting those who break the Seventh Commandment. I was confined to the backyard for the rest of the day, lest I be tempted to appropriate any other “free” stuff I might find lying about.

But my grandmother, ever the pragmatist and not particularly concerned about what the Pope might have to say on the subject, stripped and boiled the corn anyway. The entire family partook of the delectable fruits of my misdemeanor, thereby sending a mixed message and confusing me unto this very day.

I still can’t pass a supermarket bin full of corn without wishing I had a pillowcase.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.