After surviving first criminal act, a law-abiding life is easy

Even though I have known for some time that the Super Bowl is coming up, I didn't think much about it until I saw the logo for this year's game.

This will be, you know, the 40th Super Bowl, and whereas last year's contest was the XXXIX Super Bowl, this year's will simply be the XL game.

XL, of course, is 40 in Roman numerals, but seeing that logo set me to thinking. I have all sorts of clothes in my closet with that label on them. Maybe I can make a few dollars on eBay by taking my XL shirts and selling them to football fanatics.

By the time they realize my XL means "extra large," I'll be elsewhere. You're not a criminal until you're caught.

I won't do all that, though, because I've never been a good criminal. In fact, my son asked me the other day if I'd ever taken anything that didn't belong to me, and I had to relate a pitiful tale from my childhood.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, I had walked a quarter-mile up the highway to the country store that Mrs. Stephenson ran in the fork of the road. I was picking up something for my mother, but while I was there I picked up something for myself, too.

It was a couple of little Hershey bars, which at the time were two for a penny. I didn't have a penny, so I simply dropped them into my pocket and walked home.

I didn't get to enjoy my sweets, though, because when I walked in the door of our house, I was met by my guilty conscience. That was better than finding my mother, but not much.

I began thinking of how I had cheated kindly old Mrs. Stephenson, whom my family had known for years. After her husband's death, she was the one who sliced our bologna atop her meat case, sold us kerosene from a tank out back and let us check out a shelf of books left each week by the bookmobile. Whenever I didn't have enough money for a grocery run, she let me put it on the family tab. This was the woman I had ripped off.

The longer I held on to those candy bars, the softer they became in my sweating palms and the worse I felt.

When my mother wasn't looking, I trotted back up to the store. After the last paying customer had left the store, I walked up to the counter, presented the limp Hersheys and confessed my sin.

My conscience would have been relieved if she had just yelled, beaned me with a can of corn or banned me from the store, but Mrs. Stephenson wasn't like that. She gently closed my little fingers around the candy and said, "Why don't you keep those and let's forget about it."

After I left, I didn't feel like eating the chocolate, and, as the past few paragraphs show, I certainly didn't forget my first crime.

After that, a noncriminal life was a breeze. I always turned in lost lunch money I found on the school playground, took my chances at tests instead of copying off classmates and drove around with a cluttered car rather than litter on the highway.

I'm not saying I've always lived the straight and narrow, but I've tried to keep from doing the obvious crimes that neighbors, security cameras and my inner Glynn would record for eternity.

That's why, to my family's consternation, I stop at all the stop signs in my subdivision. That's why I resist robbing stores, even the easy ones that have ski masks on sale at the checkout line.

And that's why I will never make a killing with online auction schemes - unless, in the next decade, I can get myself down to wearing "large" by the time they play Super Bowl L.

Reach Glynn Moore at (706) 823-3419 or glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.