This is the story of the time I got caught stealing cookies from the kitchen of my new friend's house.
I was a fairly typical kid.
Raised in a one person house, I was used to spending a lot of time alone.
When we moved into a new neighborhood I was happy to see that several of my schoolmates lived on the same street that I did.
There was a particular boy named John that used to glare at me during recess.
I hadn't ever talked to him but he now lived at the end of my street.
Source: Pixabay.com
He turned out to be a really nice kid.
We spent just about every day playing together. The reason he was glaring at me was simply because he wanted to be friends but he didn't know how to say hello.
Well, we became the best of friends and had a ton of cool adventures in the neighborhood together.
John's family was much more affluent than mine was. We were barely getting by while his family was living the good life.
That's the kind of stuff you don't really think about when you're a kid.
One thing I always did notice though, was that his cupboards were stocked with absolutely every kind of treat you could imagine.
One day while we were playing he asked me to go into the kitchen and grab a piece of paper from the kitchen table for him.
I did so without hesitation.
On the shelf near the kitchen table were about 10 different cookie jars each filled to the brim with fresh baked cookies.
One jar really stood out. It was full of giant iced gingerbread men. I loved gingerbread men.
I was about to grab the paper and then leave the kitchen when something came over me.
I had to have one of those gingerbread men. There were so many cookies over there that surely they wouldn't miss one single cookie from one single jar.
Try to keep in mind that I was only about eight years old at this point.
In one very quick movement I opened the lid, grabbed a gingerbread cookie, and shoved it's head into my mouth.
I was probably about halfway through eating the cookie when I noticed John's mom standing next to me tapping her foot.
Her arms were folded and she looked very angry.
John came into the kitchen and gave me a very curious faced look.
You might imagine that they would have said something like "Why didn't you just ask me for a cookie?"
That wasn't what they said.
It turned out that the cookies were not for eating.
John's mom made cookies and put them in a jar, then after about one week she threw them away. You were not to eat the cookies. It turned out John's mom was pretty crazy.
It took many years and years to figure out the full extent of the nut house that he actually lived in. It must have been a miserable existence for him.
They were rich and we were just getting by, but I still preferred the place that I lived.
Now don't get me wrong, I really loved going to John's house and playing, but that was because I didn't live there.
We could jump on the trampoline, play with his multiple dogs, play video games, and do all kinds of stuff.
His mom would even bring us food, but it was always something really strange that I didn't want to eat like goat cheese pirouettes or something like that.
Remember that we were 9 and 10 years old.
I do miss going over there. I still remember with absolute clarity the time I ate the cookie that was not supposed to be eaten.
I think I may have been the first person to ever eat one of her cookies. I wouldn't be surprised I was the last one to ever eat one too.
