One of my playmates as a child was Elsie Bigler. Elsie was my age and she lived just across the street from The Rock House. Sadly, the Bigler home is no longer there. It burned down years later and its ruins have been removed for the most part, but it was there when I was growing up.
I can’t remember exactly how old I was when this incident occurred, but I was probably four or five years old. Mom and Aunt Vera Bigler were good friends so when Mom went across the street to visit Aunt Vera, I tagged along most of the time and played with Elsie. Besides their house, Aunt Vera and Uncle Laurald Bigler had a saddle shop, a big garage, a big barn and lots of places for kids to play. They had a pretty big house and on the back screened in porch they kept their freezer.
Now why Elsie and I were in the freezer in the first place I can’t remember but in opening the freezer we saw that there was a package of frozen hot dogs. It was about that moment that fierce hunger must have struck us. We both just seemed to realize that we were close to death from starvation so we opened that package of hot dogs and each of us took a frozen hot dog out to eat. I am sure that if we had asked permission to have a hot dog Aunt Vera would likely have given us one since we were about to die, but we did not ask permission. We decided to steal the hot dogs and not tell anyone. I don’t recall how the hot dogs tasted or how much our consciences bothered us. I do know that we were found out and Aunt Vera told my Mom, and I got into trouble. I was given a spanking on the spot and sent home to wait for Mom to come home for more punishment. How much punishment awaited me I didn’t know at the time.
It may have been because I was already feeling guilty about getting caught for stealing or it may have been the Lord helping me learn a lesson or in retrospect it might have just been a prank by some ornery older brothers, but what happened next left an indelible impression on my young brain that “stealing does not pay”. In fact, stealing can end up being very painful.
While I was over at Aunt Vera’s playing with Elsie and stealing hot dogs, my older brothers were at home making frosting. Now everyone knows that frosting is made by adding milk to powdered sugar. I knew that and I also knew that I liked frosting very much. I often begged to lick the spoon or the knife when Mom made frosting. I had no idea and didn’t even stop to consider why my brothers were making frosting in the middle of the day and especially when Mom was gone over to Aunt Vera’s, at that. I now know they had decided to play a little trick on me. In addition to the regular ingredients for frosting, they had added a healthy helping of cayenne pepper. When Mom sent me home I was crying, so my brothers offered me a big spoon full of frosting to cheer me up. Realizing I was already a big “sinner” probably didn’t help my ability to resist another sin—that of eating non-approved frosting without permission—so I took a big spoonful in my mouth to eat it.
As soon as I ate it I knew I was really going to die. My mouth was on fire and I couldn’t put the fire out. I started to scream in pain. My brothers thought it was a big joke. Finally Mom came home and washed out my mouth with water and killed the burning sensation but I knew that my burning mouth and the pain I had experienced was a direct result of stealing hot dogs. After all, the scriptures tell us very clearly, “Thou shalt not steal!”