I was almost a 7-year-old hobo.
Nearly 50 years ago, while awaiting the start of my second-grade reading class, I noticed a dollar bill sitting along the crack between my desk and the desk of a classmate sitting next to me. Over the next few minutes, as students filed into the classroom, that lonely dollar bill just sat there unnoticed and undisturbed.
It was the start of my most vivid childhood memory — and my most impactful childhood lesson.
I’d glance at that dollar bill every few seconds thinking, “is somebody going to pick up this thing?” I couldn’t resist any longer. Figuring the dollar bill didn’t belong to my classmate since he hadn’t grabbed it, I did. Shoot, in 1977, a dollar was a lot of money to a 7-year-old.
As the day progressed, that moment faded from my mind. By the time my mother got off work and picked me up from the after-school daycare program, I’d totally forgotten about the dollar bill.
Once we got home, as she did every day after school, my mother went through my pockets to remove the trash and clutter I’d accumulated during the day and then added my pants to the laundry pile.
Of course, she found the dollar bill. “Where’d you get this?” she asked calmly. Nervously racking my brain for some plausible explanation, I lied and told her I’d found it on a rug in the classroom.
She asked me why I didn’t alert my teacher. And I lied again. Her tone grew more firm as she continued to ask questions, and as I continued to dig myself deeper into a hole of untruths.
She told me she knew I was lying, and she had me get my belt. Not only had I taken something that didn’t belong to me, I’d lied to her repeatedly about it, she said. Finally, with tears streaming down my face, I told her the truth and I promised her that I’d never do it again.
But the whoopin’ I received was the least of my troubles, I’d soon learn.
My mother told me to call my grandmother and ask her if I could move in with her.
“I can’t have any thieves living with me,” my mother said.
I was shocked as I dialed my grandmother. “Grandma, can I come live with you?” I asked, now crying uncontrollably. I explained what happened as my grandmother tried to console me. She told me that she would take me in.
My mother then instructed me to pack a bag. She stood over me as I grabbed some shirts, pants, underwear and socks from the chest of drawers in my bedroom. She told me she’d drop off more of my things in the coming days. She then walked me down three flights of stairs in the three-story South Side apartment building where we lived.
She stopped at the landing just outside the first floor apartment and watched as I walked down the final flight of stairs to the security door that opened into the building’s vestibule. Flooded in tears, I paused and looked back at my mother. She wished me well and told me that maybe I’ll do right by my grandmother.
I then turned toward the security door and opened it. I could see the early evening sky shining through the window of the building’s front door. As I took a step, my mother called out to me. “Can you promise me that you will stop taking things that don’t belong to you?” she asked. I just nodded my head yes, and she told me to come back inside. I held her tight as we hugged on that first-floor landing.
That moment has stayed with me ever since. In many ways, it has been the basis for how I’ve tried to live my life … with honesty, with integrity, with sincerity.
But I stumbled many times after that day.
A few years later, in sixth grade, I was sent to the principal’s office multiple times for getting into fights and talking back to my teacher. There were other times in my adolescence where I betrayed the promise I made to my mother, who passed away in 2022.
But those failures were mine, not hers.
As I matured, I more fully embraced what my mother tried to teach me. And I’ve tried to impart that same lesson to my own children — though I’ve never had the courage to challenge them the way my mom challenged me that day.
Years later, I asked her about it. “Weren’t you afraid that I’d walk out that door?”
“No,” she said. “I knew my child.”
Parenting is the hardest job any of us could ever have. There’s no instruction manual, and there’s no guarantee that any particular approach will be successful. Our children aren’t wind-up toys or robots that we can program. They’re their own people with their own opinions and their own feelings.
The most we can do is to be an active participant in their lives, to teach them what we’ve learned, to show them by our example, and to hope for the best.
Alden Loury is data projects editor for WBEZ and writes a column for the Sun-Times.