{"id":31012,"date":"2023-09-27T08:21:15","date_gmt":"2023-09-27T12:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=31012"},"modified":"2023-09-27T10:45:19","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T14:45:19","slug":"things-i-have-stolen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/27\/things-i-have-stolen\/","title":{"rendered":"THINGS I HAVE STOLEN"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
\n1. <\/em>The book<\/strong><\/span> Ten Authors and Their Novels <\/em>by Somerset Maugham, from Libreria Buchholz in Bogota. I rationalized the theft because it was hard to find quality lit in English in Bogie in 1974. The bookstore carried quality English-language paperbacks, mostly Penguins from England. I justified my theft because I fantasied that Buchholz was an escaped Nazi on the lam in Latin America. I dealt with Buchholz\u2019s son, who often showed me around. Nice guy. (I found out the other day, on the web, the father had been an art dealer for Hitler, specializing in unloading \u201cdegenerate\u201d Jewish art for a profit. So there.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

2.In the late 1980s I bought a backyard jungle gym for my kids from Heights Furniture & Toy. The store failed to charge me for the tent portion — the multicolored fabric \u201ctreehouse\u201d part. I never told Heights Furniture about the error. The treehouse tent was approximately $150. I disliked the owners at Heights Furniture because they sold bikes but didn\u2019t know much about bikes. I bought a bike there \u2013- and I still use it 45 years later. So Heights Furniture was probably OK people, and I was a schmuck.<\/p>\n

3.Last week I was in Lucky\u2019s (like a Whole Foods) at West 117 Street, and I walked out with $24 in free Faroe Island salmon. The fish was free to me because I went through the self-serve checkout and screwed up on the machine. When I asked for help, the store clerk double-voided my salmon purchase.<\/p>\n

The salmon was in my bag.\u00a0I was in the parking lot. Free fish. I felt guilty but not super guilty. Funny, I had been in Rosh Hashanah services just two days prior, where the rabbi had talked about regrets.\u00a0The rabbi had regretted, for instance, not continuing to visit an elderly man in a nursing home. The rabbi had told the old man he would continue to visit but didn’t. (The rav was in college at the time.)<\/p>\n

I went<\/strong> <\/span>about my job in Lakewood.\u00a0The fish was in my car trunk. I talked to a building manager about lease renewals, and then I talked about pecados<\/em> (sins). She\u2019s from Latin America. I said the High Holidays are kind of like what Catholics do every week \u2013 confess sins. I mentioned, in part, my situation at Lucky\u2019s. She said, \u201cYou probably returned the fish.\u201d<\/p>\n

OK. I went back to Lucky’s. Three clerks thanked me for my “honesty.” I said, \u201cTell Saltzman.\u201d (The Saltzman family owns the Lucky\u2019s stores in Cleveland.)<\/p>\n

. . . I stole the book. I stole the jungle-gym tent. I didn\u2019t steal the fish. So I\u2019m bragging here. Now I gotta cut back on the bragging. (Proverbs 11:2)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  1. The book Ten Authors and Their Novels by Somerset Maugham, from Libreria Buchholz in Bogota. I rationalized the theft because it was hard to find quality lit in English in Bogie in 1974. The bookstore carried quality English-language paperbacks, mostly Penguins from England. I justified my theft because I fantasied that Buchholz was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31012"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31017,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31012\/revisions\/31017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}