Bottles and Ethics

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In Those Days, we lived in military housing sandwiched between Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay, NY.  At 10, I found it strange because it was a far cry from the small rural towns of Colonial America that I was accustomed to.  Once away from the military reservation, I was amazed at the concentration of wealthy people, who I believed were Jews.  And I quickly learned to siphon off a bit of that wealth.

It all started when I learned to collect discarded soda bottles and return them for a 2 cent deposit.  But I soon learned that the bottles refunded were stored in a cage at the rear of the store.  How easy was that?  So I climbed the short fence, took the bottles, and obtained another refund at that very store.

I loved to watch the crabbers along Sheepshead Bay.  Soon I realized that I could walk below the boardwalk at low tide. reach out and grab a line and tie it to a piling, then cut the crab cage free. A few days later I would then sell the cages to other crabbers in the area.

I'd hide beneath the boardwalk at Coney Island and watch the beach visitors to hide their purses beneath their blankets before hitting the surf.  Then I'd take their purse and remove the money before returning it to the blanket.  Sometimes I'd wait until they returned and discovered the theft.

And then it happened.  Someone stole my bike from outside Woolworth's while I was inside spending my take.  I was devastated, and cried for days before telling Mom.  Of course, not knowing that I was a thief as well, she was very sympathetic to me and promised to find a way to replace it someday.

But while waiting for that someday, my guilt grew until I confessed to Mom about the thefts I had done.  After a switching from her, and a spanking from my Dad when he got home,  And I cried, not for the punishment, but for the sorrow I felt for the people I took from.  And my life changed.

Mom took me to the grocery store and repaid my debt for the bottles.  Then she helped me make signs to post about my lost bike, and ones that we posted near the bay for the victim crabbers to contact us to make amends.  She also informed me that I could earn extra money for raking leaves, shoveling snow, and mowing lawns in the summer.

Soon I was able to pay her back for the bottle refunds she repaid, buy a rake and a snow shovel of my own, save for another bike, and buy my little sister a cheap candy at the soda shop where I returned those bottles.

And so it began for my quest to become ethical.

I taught my children what I had learned from my parents, and they passed down those stories to their children  And their children have the same ethics as their Mom and I.
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