It’s funny how some things you learned as a child and thought them to be of little significance at the time, turn out to be incredibly valuable later in life. As the saying goes, “We get too late smart and too soon old.”
I grew up in a city with a population of about 25,000.
The surrounding towns, villages, and unincorporated areas added another 50,000 for the entire county. It was a relatively short bike ride to encounter farmland. On one of my adventures on an August day, my buddy and I stopped to admire the huge cornfield. This was some delicious-looking corn. With what seemed to be miles of corn rows, surely the farmer wouldn’t care if we each took a few ears of corn.
When I returned home late in the afternoon, I showed my mother my harvest. The first thing she wanted to know was, of course, where it came from. She asked if I had permission to take the corn. When my answer was “not really,” I received the “things don’t work that way” lecture. At this point, I was sure that Dad’s part of the lesson was yet to come. Dad was a bit more detailed in his line of questioning. He was a cop and probably needed to know the who, what, where, when, and how of the crime. After hours (2 minutes) of intense interrogation, I cracked. Dad now knew the location of the offense and, as someone who was born and raised there, knew who owned the field. He opened the phone book and called Lawrence to apologize for his juvenile delinquent. It was a pleasant interaction between my dad and Lawrence, with Dad actually laughing.
It turns out that what I thought was sweet corn, was actually feed corn.
This kind of corn was wonderful to eat…if you’re a cow. My mom boiled some water and prepared the corn for me to eat. What a great day! I had a traveling adventure, learned to harvest from the earth, even the lectures were relatively mild. I really was not being punished at all.
Then came time for me to enjoy the corn. I put butter, salt and pepper on the huge yellow ear of corn and took a bite. IT WAS AWFUL. I learned the not-so-subtle difference between sweet corn and feed corn.
My dad watched me chew for a few seconds. (I now know why cows make that motion with their mouth when eating) He said you can spit that out if you like. Apparently, there was more than one part of the lesson. Dad went on to tell me how even taking an ear of corn without the permission of the owner was not right. He continued: “The farmer isn’t mad but just the same….” After the additional lecture, he said, “Now finish your corn…. just kidding”. I had taken something that didn’t belong to me, and, as it turns out, I had no use for it.
I really didn’t think of my action as theft at the time.
Lawrence, the farmer, and my parents really didn’t see this as a big deal either. What they did see was an opportunity to teach a simple lesson of right and wrong. Often suffering a small consequence early on keeps us from big consequences later.
We often measure right and wrong based on a scale of severity. If we’re not careful, we ignore the “small wrongs” to the point that the “big wrongs” become small or overlooked entirely.
Many years after the corn caper, I took a job as a police officer. One day, I was dispatched to a local school. I met a parent who was standing near a bicycle. He explained that the bicycle belonged to his son, but he found another boy had the bike in his possession. As I spoke to the young boy who was accused of the bike’s theft, he revealed how he “found” the bike. His story was legitimate based on his understanding of who owned a bike that was left unlocked.
In some ways, he viewed the bike much as I had viewed the corn years before.
The department I worked for had a community officer who truly was a natural father figure. Rather than thrust this kid and his family into the legal system, I referred the matter to the community officer. He spoke with the boy and his father with his version of the “that’s not how it works” talk.
A few weeks later, I, along with the community officer, went to “unclaimed property” and found a kid’s bike that had been there more than the required “hold time.” The bike was delivered to the young boy’s father to give to his son.
I have no idea of where this young boy ended up. However, he genuinely seemed to have learned a valuable lesson from the incident, much as I had learned from taking the corn.
January 2025
