Stealing Grapes
Larceny
DEFINITION: Larceny is a crime involving the unlawful taking of the personal property of another person or business. The intentional taking of the property of another without consent. No matter how you try to “pretty it up”… Larceny is theft… it is a Crime! It is STEALING.
Store with Grapes (now abandoned), across the street from Stanley’s.
innocence
Early on it was “innocence”… I did not know that I could not do this, when I passed by this store or had reason to go to the store, sometimes I would take a hand-full of grapes with me when I exited the store… after all, they where just sitting there… unguarded… so why not, why else would they sit of all those grapes out there like that, with no one around, unless they where out there for who ever wanted them… at least that’s what I thought (yes I thought all of that at 5 years old), this is not a joke, though it should be, who punishes a kid for taking a couple of grapes? I’ll tell you who… my mother… that’s who.
One day while at that store with my mother, while she was inside the store buying something, I waited outside where all the grapes where… and proceeded to get my fill of those oh so sweet grapes… evidently the store keeper saw what I was doing and told my mother… my mother ran out of the store grabbed me by the hand and said “Are you stealing these grapes?” And began tanning my little hide all the way back home… I was terrified… I was screaming for my life… but I was not DETERRED.
not DETERRED
That spanking stuck with me for a long time, but as with all physical discipline, it’s effects lesson with time and are soon forgotten, and in some cases even ignored completely… it’s that old adage “beat some since into him”… I hate to tell you this… but that doesn’t work, it causes resentment, and in some cases outright “rebellion”. And in my case it wasn’t long before it was all forgotten… and I was formulating another plan. It’s not like someone sat me down and explained to me what was wrong with what I did, or how I was supposed to do that, and why. Let me tell you this, it’s not like I was just sitting around trying to come up with and idea or a plan to steal, it’s just something that I did, I was just eating some of the grapes. I resented my mother for spanking me for doing so. But, in a since I think it sort of made me “rebel” and resent my mother for doing that.
Restless & Bored
One day, restless and bored me and a friend of mine (we’ll call him James, we where about the same age) we where sitting around under our the porch… it was hot, I was restless, and I had to do something about it, anyway I devised a plan where we could get some ice cream… for “FREE.”
Stanley’s
I realized that we could “hit” the neighborhood grocery store “Stanley’s”… and get away with it. My friend James immediately (being only 6 or 7 years old like me) “shook” at the though of doing so, but I was good… and immediately calmed him down, and convinced him that we could pull it off as long as he did “exactly” what I was telling him to do, and that even if I got caught he would not be connected with the “heist.”
I had a plan…