Getting Over Antietam

Even obsessions cannot survive teen-age hormones.   One school morning, at age fifteen, totally out of the blue, I awoke realizing that I was burdened with a cloud from the past, that it was effectively barring social relationships in the present, and that I needed to dispel it.  I needed mental fresh air.  I needed a date.  And to me that required some kind of ritual cleansing.  As I lay in bed, my mind settled on a plan in a matter of minutes.  I needed to sacrifice the tiny pile of books on the Civil War I had purchased with saved school lunch money, a dozen or so treasured volumes.

The following Saturday morning, I gathered up those books, stuck them in a bag, and set out for (I told my parents) the bus to the library downtown.  To do homework, I told them; they were all school texts, I said.  Instead of the library stop, however, I got off where the main department store was located.  I ventured into the seven-story edifice with trepidation, convinced that I was a marked man, with countless eyes tracking my every move, from the cosmetic corner near the entrance on up.  And up the escalator I went, past women’s clothes, men’s clothes, records, housewares, the mechanical steps ascending at an infuriatingly leisurely pace.  At my appointed level, the fifth floor book department, I scanned the terrain to ensure that no one was around (I had rehearsed this operation on previous training runs), and hurried to the designated table, one displaying books on history and current events.  It had the requisite shelving below hip level, perfectly designed for me to slip in my wares with a minimum chance of discovery.  No one, neither customer nor sales associate, was visible.  Even booklovers weren’t up at 10:00 on a Saturday morning.

Driven by fear of the ghastly fate of confrontation by Authority Figures, I dropped to my knees and rapidly emptied the contents of the bag onto the shelf, spines upright, though not in alphabetical order by author, I would later lament.  There was no time to pause for such details.  Reverse shoplifting, like its far more common mirror image, had to be brief, a decisive and fleeting act.  Then it was time to clutch the empty bag and depart as I had come, down escalators that moved even more deliberately than before, I thought. 

But I made it out the rotary doorway unchallenged.  Either I looked innocent enough to evade detection by store detectives, or else no one cared about items that were smuggled into a store, or even conceived of the possibility that someone would actually do that.  Or there were no store detectives around to begin with at that hour.  I wondered afterwards, what happened when it came time to take inventory; some poor sales associate would be scratching his or her head, wondering how volumes that hadn’t been ordered had mysteriously materialized.  Hopefully that person got overtime pay for dealing with the headache I caused by attempting to let go of my own issues.  There are always consequences to one’s actions.

But the deed was done, the books were gone, and I had purged myself of the past in a kind of psychic bulimia.  It would never return.  I was now free.