Month: October 2018

For my eighth birthday, I got my ears pierced. I had noticed that a lot of beautiful, sophisticated, and cool people in the public eye had their ears pierced, and, I didn’t realize it until afterward, but I must have thought that the earring gun shooting through my earlobe would set off magic shockwaves that would turn me into the kind of person I admired- someone who looked like a supermodel, who suddenly had fashion sense and personality, who could paint and play the guitar and rescue injured animals. How disappointing, then, to find that it was just me, only with gold stud earrings.  

The part of the day I remember most, though, had to do with grey area. I had been looking forward to this day for weeks. It was going to happen at the mall, at Claire’s Boutique. The initial piercing had to be done with boring ball-shaped earrings, so I had also picked out these tiny gold scallop seashell earrings, which had to be special ordered. My mom drove me to the mall on the big day, and after the piercing and purchasing, I was carrying the bag with my new seashell earrings. About five or ten steps from Claire’s, the bag slipped out of my hand, and I stepped on the earrings, bending the posts. I started crying, feeling like a huge baby, crying in public over a piece of metal. As far as I could see, we either ate the cost and forgot about the earrings, or else my clumsiness would result in me or my parents having to buy another set of earrings, which seemed too expensive. Here was the dilemma I looked to my mom to solve. The world stopped, my mom and I standing, facing each other in the middle of the hallway, two rocks in a river, other shoppers flowing smoothly past us. After thinking for a minute, my mom said, “Well, we’ll go back and tell them that you dropped the bag and that someone stepped on them.” What a brilliant solution! That was the day I consciously learned that between Lies and The Whole Truth lived a spectrum of many shades, a bedrock of layers, a multi-faceted gem of truth. Even though the technique could just as easily be used against me, on that day, we were able to tilt the truth to our advantage, granting a child’s birthday wishes.