Thursday, March 14, 2013

Scintilla#13, Day 2

Today's prompts:
1. What's the biggest lie you've ever told? Why? Would you tell the truth now, if you could?

2. Tell a story about something interesting (anything!) that happened to you, but tell it in the form of an instruction manual (Step 1, Step 2, etc.).

Since I've been pretty much out of commission since the end of December and my days have been mostly spent sitting in a recliner with my foot elevated, not much of interest has happened. I'm currently doing physical therapy, but that's not interesting to anybody except me. And at this moment, I'm simply brain-dead about anything 'interesting.' So no to number 2.

As much as I despise liars now, I will confess to having told a few whoppers when I was much younger. No, really. I haven't done much lying for a long time. Perhaps I haven't revealed everything I know, to be sure, but that's not exactly a lie. (Is it?)

I can't really talk about the biggest lie because there are people still alive who don't know, and while I don't think they read this blog, I am not revealing those secrets. (And I'm still glad I told it. It was literally life-changing for me.)

One of the big lies I remember happened just after I got my driver's license at age 16. I was hot to drive by myself the mint green old (1950-something) Nash Rambler that was my mother's car. She'd gotten her license just months before I got mine, and the folks bought the Rambler because it was an automatic shift -- she hated the stick shift on our primary car as much as I did.

I finally got permission to drive my brother and myself to our Sunday night church youth group, but not until my parents had extracted a promise from me to 'Go straight to church and come straight home.'  I vowed to do just that, totally excited to at last have wheels! WooHOO!

But. One of my closest friends needed a ride home, and I volunteered. I mean, what could happen? It wasn't too far out of our way, just a jog here and there, and then straight home. I assured her it would be fine. Jimmy, my brother, was fine with that.

No problem. We pulled into her gravel driveway, she hopped out, and then I took my foot off the brake momentarily. The passenger front door was still open a little since my brother had transferred into the front seat. And the edge of the door caught a sturdy tree that was near the edge of her driveway, wrenching it open with a loud screech of protesting metal.

Oh. My. God.

I knew I would never be allowed to drive again.  I would be grounded for life. It was going to be expensive. And I had disobeyed my parents' explicit orders. (I was a very obedient child, I must say, pretty much always doing what was expected of me. At least at that point...)

Jimmy and Carol Ann and I put our heads together -- theirs being much cooler than my panic-stricken one --  and came up with a story. There were concrete half posts interspersed throughout the church parking lot. We decided that I had backed a little too close to one of them and Jimmy had not yet closed the door all the way and it just caught the edge and bent it. Right? Right.

The door wasn't hanging off the hinge, but it didn't close all the way either, and Jimmy hung onto it to keep it more or less closed all the way home. Tearfully I explained to my folks what had happened AT CHURCH and how sorry I was, and he backed me up, straight-faced and solemn.

If they didn't quite buy the story, I didn't hear about it. Carol Ann never said a word. And my brother and I have never talked about the big lie we conspired to tell our parents so many years ago.

Would I tell the truth now? Uh. Probably not. The car was fixed and as I recall wasn't a big expense but more of a big inconvenience. We were allowed to drive to church by ourselves at least occasionally. But I never again deviated from the 'straight to church, straight home' instructions. I knew I'd gotten away with it once, but was sure it would never happen again.

1 comment:

BBC said...

Silly me, I bookmarked a post of yours and kept returning to it and missing the newer posts but that is now corrected.

I'm sure I did my share of lying as a kid trying to get out of trouble but as an adult I have an aversion to it, but I know many adults that lie, a lot.