It’s a short story really, but the one in which i learned true guilt verses false shame. When i was young, i loved silly putty. It came in a plastic egg, and you would take the magic stuff, and roll it over comics or any newspaper article and it would make a copy. Sort of permeative zeroing. To me it was magical. It’s all I ever wanted, and endless supply of silly putty. Anyways, I had bought some with my ice ream money and stashed it in my grandmother’s sewing drawer.

She said i could play with it at the end of the day, if i did all my chores. But I just couldn’t wait. As I picked up the papers and books around the house, i kept seeing potential things to copy. I’ve always had this desire to copy things, and to make them portable.

When I lived in Jerusalem years later, i would record all the conversations I had with the kids I was teaching. That also got me in a lot of trouble when i left the country. But that is another story.

In this one, i decided to “clean” out the sewing room. Of course, i got out the silly putty and started making copies of magazine prints. One of them, it turns out was actually a pattern my grandmother was using to make a garment.

She eventually returned to her sewing room, and saw that part of her pattern had actually been lifted. Let me explain that silly putty is not a perfect medium; sometimes, it actually lifts off the print on the thing it is making a facsimile of. That was that. I was busted. My grandmother came downstairs with that look of justice. Derek, did you use the silly putty to copy my pattern upstairs. Yes mam, I did.

It was useless to plead innocent, the proof was still in the putty.

She put the fear of God in me that day, by making me sit in silence for one hour and consider what I had done. After that day, I never disobeyed her again, but I did maintain a healthy supply of silly putty all the way into my twenties.

I remember the first time I went into a small printing press and had that same rush of excitement I’d had when i first discovered silly putty. That never went away. Neither did the fear of disobeying my grandmother.