I woke this morning to discover I had gotten a transient lingual papillitis also known as a fungiform papillary glossitis. To be perfectly honest (which I should be considering the title of this post), I had to look up the correct terminology for what my mother told me is a "lie bump". To be such a little thing it is incredibly annoying. I am reasonably confident I told no lies between the time I went to bed last night and the time I got up this morning, so obviously this little irritant is caused by something else. I'm not a very good liar anyway. It is always so obvious in my facial expressions when I am lying, it is hardly worth the effort. That is not to say I have never told a lie. I have, and I have almost always ended up immediately regretting it for one reason or another. It's just so much less stressful to stick to the truth.
I still remember as clearly as if it were yesterday, the time my mother caught me in a whopper. After my father finally deserted us for the last time, our lives took a turn that closely resembled Charles Dickens' dark tale of Oliver Twist. (Interesting fact, my sister Cathy is married to a Dickens who, it turns out, is a distant relative of Charles.) After a few years of foster care and/or children's home, we were finally reunited with our mother and she was allowed to rent a home in state subsidized housing (commonly known as The Projects). The units had originally been built to house married enlisted men and their families during the war, so you can imagine they weren't of the finest construction from the start. They were made of stucco and each building had two living areas that backed up to each other, so there was a front door on either end of the building. A few had one bedroom, a slightly larger number had two bedrooms, but most had three bedrooms. If you had three girls and two boys living at home (as we did at that time), three bedrooms did not go a long way toward offering anyone privacy. Originally, they were all white, but being as it was Florida, the state decided one year to fancy the place up and painted each building either turquoise or flamingo or sand or canary. It seemed to me that it just made the place look even less like I wanted to live there. In the 1950's The Projects in Miami were populated completely by poor white families, mostly single parent and usually with an abundance of kids. In retrospect, I have to wonder if all of us white people were taking up the housing in The Projects, what in the world were all the poor blacks and Cubans (it was Miami after all) doing? I makes me shudder just trying to imagine. I do recall one family that had both parents, Fred and Mary. Mary had polio which may have been part of the reason the family was on welfare, but they also had Ricky, Dickie, Benjie, Johnny and Candy to feed. Now here is another tangential thought, aren't Ricky and Dickie both nicknames for someone named Richard? Were both of those boys named Richard, I wonder? Or, were Ricky and Dickie their given names? I guess I'll never know because though I remember all the first names, I have no memory at all of their surname.
Okay, back to how I got caught in a lie. There was a family (the Quicks) who lived in The Projects near us and had a daughter my age named Donna. We were both about nine or ten. Donna had two younger brothers, but I don't remember their names. She had tried to flush one of them down the commode right after he was born, but she was not successful. She did succeed in flushing his diaper and stopping up the plumbing which is how she got caught. Her brother suffered no ill effects and by the time I met them, Donna was resigned to having not one but two little brothers and no longer tried to harm either one any more than necessary. One afternoon Donna and I were hanging around at her house just wasting time. There were some framed pictures on the table near where I was sitting and I started fiddling with one. I have no idea what possessed me to take the back off the frame, but before I knew it, I had the thing in pieces in my lap. When it came apart, a $10 bill fell out of it's hiding place behind the picture inside the frame. Now in the 1950's $10 would go a lot further than it will now. It was also a significant amount of money for anyone who was on welfare and living in The Projects. I am not normally a thief, but that $10 just somehow ended up in the pocket of my shorts and I immediately reassembled the picture frame and put it back on the table. I thought no one saw me, and I was sure I had gotten away with it.
After I left Donna's, I took my ill-gotten booty to the local general store. There was still such a thing as penny candy when I was young, and you could buy an awful lot of penny candy with $10. That is exactly what I did. Then I hurried home with my stash where fortunately everyone had gone someplace, and I was able to sneak my treasure into the house and hide it in a closet. I shared my room with both my sisters, so I can't imagine how I thought I was going to keep that big bag of candy a secret. Later that day, after Mrs. Quick got home from work, she must have noticed the picture had been moved and checked to see if her $10 was still there. Well, of course it wasn't, so she started asking questions. I don't know which of the Quick kids ratted on me, it may even have been Donna, but it doesn't matter. Someone told Mrs. Quick they had seen me messing with the picture. She put two and two together and instantly came up with Carla.
Mrs. Quick arrived at our front door and had a short conversation with my mother. My mother called out to me in that voice. You know that voice. The one where you start cringing as soon as you hear it because you know your ass is grass and Mom is the mower. I arrived at the front door and my mother explained why Mrs. Quick had dropped in for a visit. I looked at them both, opened my mouth and said "No, I didn't take any money." Well, like I said earlier, I'm a terrible liar. My mother knew instantly I was lying. She came down on me like an Avenging Angel, and it was no time at all until I was admitting the theft and telling the tale of the trip to the store for all that candy. Now bear in mind I hadn't eaten much of the candy because I had to hide it. My mother gave Mrs. Quick back the $10 (which she could ill afford) and made me apologize. My mother also assured Mrs. Quick I would be punished for stealing, but more than for stealing I was going to be punished for lying.
I had to do many extra chores around the house to "earn" back the $10 to repay my mom. We didn't get an allowance because poor people don't have money enough to give kids allowances. We also always did chores around the house as a normal part of our lives because Mom worked, sometimes two and three jobs, and someone had to do the housework. But I ended up doing a whole lot more work than my siblings for a very long time. She also took my entire bag of candy and divided it amongst the rest of my siblings, leaving absolutely none for me. Siblings, being as they are, taunted me whenever they would eat a piece of my candy stash, but I deserved every bit of it and more.
I can honestly say I never stole anything of importance after that adventure (unless you count an inadvertent pen from the office). I have told a few lies, usually to avoid hurting someone's feelings, but I still can't lie with a straight face. I always get caught. It's easier to just avoid the whole thing all together. Anyway, I seem to find so many other ways to get myself in trouble without having to lie.
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