The
first lie I remember telling was in the second grade, and it saved my soul. I
can say with confidence that I told plenty of whoppers prior to that May in 1972
because I possessed all of the requisite outside forces necessary to lead me
down the path of righteous fibbing: I had a sister (younger and gullible), I
liked candy (more than my meager allowance could supply), I placed homework far
behind Gilligan’s Island (a tangled web of tropical survival lies), I loved all
things Barbie (a lifestyle of lies: Dream House, Friend Ship airplane, Malibu,
Ken), and most importantly, I was a fan of Columbo and his lie-detecting
skills, which made me, by keen observation, an expert liar. I can’t readily recall by name any of
the lies I told up until then, and not many of them afterward. Surely there
were hundreds of spur-of-the-moment survival quips, uttered and then forgotten,
along the lines of, “Did you eat your broccoli?” “Yes!” “Did you brush your
teeth?” “Yes!” “Who released the emergency brake?!” “Not me.” My earliest remembered lie was the
first I had to work for, dig deep into my soul and wrestle out, fabricate in
just the right way, form just so and present perfectly. And then, oddly enough,
for an encore I had to beg forgiveness. Or pretend to. Peter Falk would have
been proud.
