As a little boy, I learned many lessons the hard way, as I’m sure many young children do even today. They say we are born into the world with absolutely nothing and that we spend the rest of our lives accumulating as much of the world’s goods as we can. Sometimes we start the process before we have the means to do so (in an appropriate way). Learning the lessons of honesty can be both a little painful as well as embarrassing even for a small boy. Now, as a very old man, I have little interest in worldly goods. But my mind is still capable of bringing me back to the time that I was so enamored with a “worldly good,” and I accumulated it.
The story of my first accumulation goes something like this: When I was about four years old I was in a dime store (also referred to as 5 & 10 Cent stores) with my mother. They don’t have them anymore, but there was probably one in every town in the 1930s. We affectionately refer to that era as “the olden days.” While my very sweet little, hard-working mother was shopping for thread, needles and buttons (she was a seamstress), I too, was busy doing my own shopping in the toy department. Dime stores carried everything it seemed, and most things they carried cost a dime or less. It so happened that a brightly colored little toy car caught my eye. Because my “resister” hadn’t been taught to resist yet, the car went directly from point A to point B. Point B being my knicker pocket. Knicker won’t mean anything to most people today. Knickers were knee length pants with button down straps going over the shoulders to hold them up. The straps seldom stayed on my shoulders, and I was constantly putting them back on. (Stories from long ago would always go faster if the story teller did not have to stop every so often to explain old words and/or practices.) I had not yet been taught the concept of accumulation with obligation and its counterpart (stealing) and the associated punishment for doing it. But curiously, inside my little head or heart, I knew that I should not have taken that little car, there was something that did not feel exactly right about it. But, at that moment, my desire to accumulate was stronger than that feeling.
It wasn’t very long after we arrived home that I was discovered playing with a new toy, a toy that had not been purchased by anyone in our family. That very afternoon when my Dad arrived home from work, he took his little boy by the hand and with the stolen toy in the other hand, returned to the dime store. He told the store manager that if he would not take the toy back, that he would pay for it. Fortunately, the owner took it back with a few warning words for a scared little boy. I was so embarrassed and thought for sure something terrible would happen to me for what I had done. I had heard of jails and maybe even thought that I might be put in one. This was one of those few times that I got a loving spanking on my little behind and a verbal lesson about honesty later that evening. The end of that story.
I don’t believe that I was really much different than many other little boys while learning the art of acquisition and accumulation. All the Hanson kids were taught that accumulation of worldly goods came after hard and honest work, although a couple of them had to go through the same embarrassing experience that I did. For example: My firstborn son came home from school with some apples one day, and when queried as to where they came from, he said that he had taken them from a nearby orchard. Though, now as a man, I still remembered exactly how my father dealt with a similar situation. I was a well-trained father in these matters. I took him by the hand and went back to the orchard with the apples that were left and knocked on the door of the owner. It was a very similar experience for him and just as important a teaching experience as the one that I had as a boy. Fathers taking their little ones by the hand back to the store, or to the orchard owner, is probably the best deterrent to a life of dishonest behavior.
The above stories or similar stories could, most likely, have been written by any other father. Can you see how powerful this story would be in the lives of youth, if read generation after generation to little boys and little girls, knowing that it happened first to their very own grandfather? Several of my grandchildren have expressed to me how important my stories have been in shaping their very own lives. I know and can testify of the power of storytelling as the major part of one’s personal history.