On Stealing: A Teddy Bear and the Devil (845 words)

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I was about 8 years old, and I wanted that stuffed animal in the store. I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, it felt like. I burned with the wanting. And I didn’t have enough money to buy it.

We were feral, latchkey kids in the late 70s and early 80s, and every day after school I would ride my little bike with the banana-shaped seat and the handlebars shaped like a McDonald’s logo and plastic tassels streaming off the handles. It’s hard to imagine today letting an 8-year-old kid—or younger—just ride off by themselves, nobody knows where they are, but that’s how it was. And one day I rode to a little shop, and right in the front, right near the door, was this incredible teddy bear.

Stuffed animals were my absolute favorite toys. I knew all my stufties’ names and personalities. They all slept with me. They were real to me, almost as real as my family, and at least in my memory, I spent as much if not more time with them as I did with my family. And I knew—I knew—that this bear would just get along so well with all the other stuffed animals. He needed to come home with me. Not just need—he was begging me to get him out of there, looking at me with these sad hopeful eyes, like the kind you experience when you go to a rescue dog shelter and you’re “just looking” but you know you’re going to end up going home with a dog that day. It was like that.  

The problem was, my allowance at the time was about 25 cents a week, which was enough to buy a pack of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, but not enough for an awesome teddy bear.

 So I sat there staring at this bear, steeped in frustrated desire. And I started thinking about how I was going to go about stealing it.

I don’t think of my childhood as particularly religious, we weren’t taken to Sunday school every week, but we went fairly regularly. And one Sunday school teacher had encouraged us kids to find a quiet moment and ask Jesus into our hearts as our personal lord and savior. And one I remember Saturday morning, I was up early—the house was quiet, and everyone else was still asleep. I was sitting alone in the beat-up wicker rocking chair in our kitchen, and in that pearly gray stillness of early morning, I decided: it was time. And so sitting there, I asked Jesus into my heart. And nothing happened. So I asked him again, and nothing happened. And after I asked him a third time with the same result, I thought: “HUH.” And that “huh” would go on to harden in my teenage years into a deeply cynical suspicion of this elaborate hoax, which existed only to extract money from people by preying on their fear of death. Which was how I viewed organized religion until I was well into adulthood, middle age even, and I began to understand metaphor, and mythology, and our species’ need for moral stories. And how we are all, in our souls and in the world, engaged in the eternal battle between light and darkness, which has always been and always will be.

But as an 8-year-old plotting to steal a teddy bear, my thoughts were not so nuanced. I actually just thought about the devil. Even though I wasn’t a religious kid, I’d still seen all the Looney Tunes cartoons with an angel sitting on one shoulder and a devil on the other, and I understood, deeply and viscerally, that this was a choice. I knew that I could choose in this moment to do good or choose to do bad. I knew that stealing was wrong, and choosing to steal somehow felt like I would be giving in. I was a competitive child, and I didn’t want the devil to win. I wanted to win.

And so, thinking about the devil, I ended up not stealing that stuffed animal that day. Looking back on it, I doubt I would have been able to—the shopkeeper seeing this kid obsessively staring at this bear would have been thinking: “That kid’s going to try to steal that bear.”

I left the shop and rode my little banana bike home, and on that ride, that fever of acquisition that had gripped me broke, and I realized I didn’t really care about having the teddy bear anymore.

Looking back on it, I remember two things.  The first is that, once you make the decision to do the right thing that seems like the haxrd thing, it becomes really easy after that. The second lesson, which I still try to keep in mind when I find myself idly shopping online, is that: there will always be another pair of shoes. There will always be another gadget. There will always be another stuffed animal. I don’t have to get this one.

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This piece was originally performed at a Moth Story Slam in Houston, Texas on July 16th, 2024. The theme that night was "Temptation."