My parents raised the five of us with a few basic, common sense rules: never hit your brother or sister; share equally which meant dividing a red golf-ball sized post war gumball into five sections as evenly as possible; and one main rule we still live by: Don’t touch what isn’t yours. That rule kept us from helping ourselves to someone else’s pork chop at the dinner table, to toys without permission, wearing a sibling’s coveted sweater when she wasn’t, or riding another’s bike without them knowing. The absence of sibling skirmishes contributed to a calm and happy household.
As we aged, observing the rule kept us from jail when so many others were in a rush to get there for joyriding in a parked car or speeding down backroads on a neighbour’s ATV.
The benefit of the rule sank in particularly deep early in my marriage the day I sought to free up shelf space in our mobile home by transferring my husband’s sizeable stash of “Das Bild” tabloids to an outdoor shed. At the time English was still too difficult for him to enjoy reading British Columbia newspapers. Instead he bought each weekly issue of the German publication.
I of all people should have been sensitive to his attachment to his several years’ stack of the paper. I had my own collection of women’s magazines including McCall’s, Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, Redbook and more.
When he discovered I had moved his tabloids to a backyard building without his say so, the fur flew. At least I had not burned them or in some other way made them unreadable. If I had, life might have been frosty for a few days.
In hindsight, I had freed little shelf space. Certainly the kerfuffle that ensued erased all benefit. It did, however, reinforce Mom’s maxim – don’t touch what isn’t yours.
Having lived for so many years with the rule I was unaware how it guided my daily behaviour, until a chat with a younger person brought it to the surface.
Seems some years back a parent tossed out a teen’s coveted collection of Pokemon cards. Now I never understood the appeal or purpose of Pokemon cards but I recall how my grandchildren were “into them” when they were elementary students. Nintendo published the cards beginning in 1996. Adults are likely to collect and trade baseball or hockey cards (something else I don’t get) but Pokemon … well, to each his own.
Listening to the recitation of how bereft the kid felt after his collection had been garbaged, without a thought as to how he might feel about their loss, took me back to those German tabloids I had spirited off to dry but distant storage. Chances are the Pokemon cards can be replaced, at some cost since they now have a collector’s value, but they won’t have the feel or cachet of the originals gradually accumulated one at a time and probably thumbed through each time a new one was added, shown to siblings or friends, carefully housed in a box apart from everyday toys.
How many ills would society be spared if everyone lived by Mom’s rule? We’d need no more Amber Alerts. Women wouldn’t go missing along our highways. Police could take time off. Courts dockets would be freed up. Security companies would have to find another line of business. Taxes would go down.
All those benefits from following one simple rule. Think of it.