My First Time.

This memory occurred to me yesterday after "accidentally" going home with a pair of gloves that were hidden in a coat at the thrift store. I also bought a pair of really amazing white studded boots. Anyway, the memory might become a short story...

The first time I stole anything it was close to my fifth birthday. I was still living in Queens with both of my parents, long after their disdain for one another had begun but three years pre-divorce. We were shopping for a Christmas tree in one of those typical parking lot gone pine tree factories that begin to appear just before you're ready to accept that it's already Thanksgiving. The kind of places that made me promise myself at an early age that I would someday raise kids in this city, if for nothing other than the inescapable smell of Christmastime in New York.

In the tree lined lot two blocks from our building, I fell in love with a branch spray painted white with a faint silver shimmer that glistened in the brisk yellow dimmed air, and I wanted it more than anything I had ever wanted before. With the kind of confidence you rarely find in a 5 year old, I walked up to my mother and asked if she could buy it for the front door of our 6th story apartment. Without knowing at the time that she would skip meals in order to buy quarter pound containers of seafood salad for me, I could not find reasoning for her stern "No" and tucked the branch under my zebra print down coat with neon pink lining as I ducked into the next row of pines...