Jean De La Bruyere says, “If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is their father.” This was true in my case.

My first brush with crime happened when I was eight years old. At the time, we lived across from my school, Smalley Elementary. Weekdays, as my classmates passed by our apartment building, they littered with abandon, dropping candy wrappers, chewed up gum and school papers. Each Saturday, my father paid me a nickel to pick up the mess.

After school one day, a boy named Sammy and I were commiserating about our lack of funds to buy candy. I had very little money and he had none. We cooked up a plan to remedy the situation. Back then, you’d get a nickel for every empty soda bottle you returned to the store. We knew that people stored their return bottles in wooden crates by their porch door. We figured we’d steal the bottles and redeem them ourselves.

One afternoon, Sammy and I ran from porch to porch, grabbing empty bottles from tenements on our block. In no time, we collected about twenty. As we loaded them into Sammy’s wagon, visions of Squirrel Nut Zippers and Hot Tamales danced in our heads.

We hauled the loot to the corner grocery store, a tiny place run by an Armenian couple named Joseph and Mary. They immediately became suspicious. These grocers knew their customers would never willingly hand over valuable bottles to a pair of ragamuffins.

Neither Mary nor Joseph spoke English well. However, on a phone call to my mother, they managed to convey the gist of our nefarious deed. My parents made us return the bottles to their rightful owners, which we did, although without much accuracy.

Later, my mother tried to scare me into good behavior by reading me the Adam and Eve story. However, I did not grasp the relevance of that Bible story to Sammy and me. Our get-rich-quick scheme involved no apple, no serpent, and no tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Plus, unlike Adam and Eve, Sammy and I remained fully clothed at all times.

One year later, my second brush with crime involved a direct encounter with a law enforcement officer. Our family was vacationing in upstate New York. We visited the Catskill Game Farm, Fort Ticonderoga, and a shoe factory.

Midway through our shoe factory tour, the overwhelming smell of dye nauseated me. I lost my breakfast in a humiliatingly public way. As our family rushed out, the tour guide handed me a consolation prize, a tall spool of heavy string.

`           Back in the car, to cheer myself up, I tied the string to my white stocking. Then I sailed my sock out the car window, kite-style, as we cruised down the highway. I felt exhilarated.

From the front seat, my parents didn’t notice my attempt at self-entertainment. But later, my parents did notice the flashing red light and the blaring siren coming from a police car behind us.

“License and registration,” the cop said.

My father knew he hadn’t been speeding. “What’s the problem?”

“Littering.” The cop scribbled out a ticket.

When I realized what had happened, I yelled, “No. Not littering. See? I still have my sock.”  I managed to persuade the policeman that we technically didn’t litter because the sock had never landed. We did not get a ticket. Tragically, I did not get to keep the string.

Sophocles says, “All people make mistakes, but a good person yields when she knows her course is wrong.” At nine, I pivoted. I shunned my life of crime. No more recycling scams and no more faux littering. However, these days when life gets rough and I need to cheer myself, I’m tempted to fly a sock-kite out my car window to see if I can experience that youthful exhilaration once again.