Night Farm

20x24 oil

One warm Kailua Saturday morning, my friend Terry and I were lounging in his front yard trying to think of something to do. Nothing moved on our quiet dead-end street except for a few flies hovering over the grass. I guess we were eight, maybe nine years old.

Terry was lying on his back with his hands behind his head, looking up at the sky. “Boring,” he said.

I nodded. It was. Sort of. But really, I didn’t mind sitting around doing nothing.

Then out of nowhere, brilliance came charging in.“I got an idea!” I said, scrambling to my feet. “Come on. This is gonna be great!”

“What idea?”

“Follow me.”

One street beyond our neighborhood there was a big, quonset-hut-shaped grocery store called Foodland. The parking lot was always packed with cars on the weekends. We often went over there for cherry cokes and frozen fudge bars. But on this day, that parking lot was a gold mine.

“What do you see?” I asked, looking at Foodland from across the street.

Terry shrugged. “I don’t know. Cars?”

“Cars!”

Terry frowned. “So?”

“So we can collect hubcaps.”

“What’s hubcaps?”

We ran across the street, cars honking, drivers shouting.

“See this?” I said, crouching at the right rear tire of one of the cars. I tapped the little cap that screws onto the air valve. “That’s your hubcap,” I said. “We can collect them.”

Terry looked at me. “You mean, just take them off the tires? Like steal them?”

“It’s not stealing,” I said. “Look.” I unscrewed the cap. “See? The tire doesn’t go flat. They don’t even need them.”

Terry duck-walked to the front tire and unscrewed the cap. He looked at it. “Cool,” he said, and stuck it in his pocket.

We spent the next hour collecting hubcaps. By the time we slunk back to our street our pockets were bulging. We poured them out onto the grass in Terry’s front yard and tried to count them. There were a lot. Almost two hundred!

“You can have mine,” Terry said, growing bored again.

“Ho! Really?”

“Yeah, sure. What do I want with hubcaps?”

I scooped them up and headed home looking like I had a hundred dollars in pennies in each of my front my pockets.

That night, I sat at the dinner table with my mom, step-dad, and three sisters. Under the table I patted the treasures in my pockets. Man, they felt good. It was great to have such a healthy collection. If they were quarters I’d be rich!

After a while, I started to feel guilty about what Terry had said. We didn’t steal them.

Did we?

I frowned and tried to eat my dinner. But in my head an argument was heating up.

Guilt was growing. It wouldn’t shut its yap. “You stole those things today. They weren’t yours. And taking what’s not yours is stealing!”

No, no, no, I spat back. Those cars didn’t need them. The tires didn’t go flat!

Seriously, I’m telling you, that was stealing. The police are probably looking for you right now.

Soon guilt was coming out of my ears like ants from a disturbed ant hole. A half hour from now you’re going to be riding in the back seat of a cop car on your way to jail. Confess! It’s your only chance!

I couldn’t take it anymore. I put my fork down and rubbed my sweaty palms on my jeans, feeling again the mounds of hubcaps in my pockets. “Um … Mom?”

Mom looked up, smiling.

“I … uh … um I think I … um … I think I stole something today.”

Mom’s smile froze, then fell off her face. She stared at me a moment, then looked down the table at my step-dad sitting at the other end. I turned to look at him. He kept on eating, not overly concerned about the fact that I might soon be heading to prison. “What’d you steal?” He said, not looking up.

I swallowed. “Um … um … hubcaps?”

His fork stopped halfway to his mouth. He cocked his head and slowly lowered his hand. He looked at me sideways. “Come again?”

“Hubcaps. I stole hubcaps off the parked cars at Foodland.”

For a second he didn’t move. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “How many hubcaps?”

“Two hundred.”

“TWO HUNDRED!”

He stood with such force that his chair flew back against the wall. “You stole two hundred hubcaps?”

Across from me, my sisters jumped and gaped at him. One was in a highchair and looked like she was about to cry.

“Maybe it … wasn’t that many?” I squeaked.

He glared at me for a long moment, then leaned forward, his fists balled on the table. When he found his voice he said, “Where are they? What did you do with them?”

I quickly reached into my pocket, pulled a handful out, and scattered them over the table like M&Ms. My sisters eagerly grabbed them up.

“I have more,” I said. “They’re in my other pocket.”

My mom started coughing, choking on a laugh.

My step-dad sat back down and put his head in his hands, shaking it. “Those ... are ... not … hubcaps. They’re AIR caps. Hubcaps are the big silver plates that cover the bolts on a wheel. Good God, boy, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”

The next day he took me and my stuffed pockets back over to Foodland to return every cap I took. But we should have given it more thought, because we only found two cars that were missing any.

I can’t say that I learned all there is to know about creating a meaningful life from that experience, but I decided that my thieving days were over. And burned into my brain was the consequence of using the wrong word. “Air cap” was a joke. “Hubcap” was a felony.

But there was a bigger lesson to be learned, which I didn’t absorb until years later, and that is that the world around me is held together by a certain agreed-upon code, which includes things like not stealing, and if I wanted to live a good life, I would have to give that code some serious thought.

It took my prep school headmaster, a few years down the road, to finally bring it all together for me -- I needed a set of values to live by. “If I can teach you boys anything,” Mr. Taylor said more than once, ”it would be how to be men of good character. Your integrity is more valuable than all the gold in the world. Hitch your wagon to a star.” Those might not be his exact words, but his mission was exactly that.

And I’ve tried my best to walk in starlight ever since.