Oh, and about shoplifting...

There's an old saying, you'd never believe it unless it happened to you.

Well, it did happen to me, so sometimes when people make these "phony sounding" excuses about shoplifting, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Not sure about this particular case - the beauty pageant woman who said the items had "rolled under her purse" - but there was a case a few years ago when a prominent black businesswoman - prominent in her own city, anyway, was arrested for shoplifting because she'd picked up some photos from the back of the store photo shop, and forgot to pay for them when she got to the front of the store. The judge didn't believe her, but hell, I found it totally believable.

Anyway, here's my story.

Many, many years ago I owned a triplex. Lived in one floor and rented out the other two. In one of these floors lived a couple of friends of mine, a girl and her brother - one was 19 the other 20, and they didn't have a car, so I'd take them shopping.

It was winter, I had on a long winter coat with deep pockets, and I'm wandering around the various aisles with these two, my mind on other things. They had their own cart, I wasn't thinking of buying anything.

So we're in the salad dressing aisle, and I see some brands I'd never seen before, so I decide, what the heck, I'm going to try two of these.

So, I picked them up.

A few minutes later, we're in the checkout line. I let them go first, meanwhile I'm looking through the cart for my two bottles of salad dressing and I can't find them. And I'm pawing through the items and saying,"I know I picked them up, what the hell?"

And finally the girl said, "You put them in the pockets of your coat."

And I stare at her and say, "No way."

And then I thrust my hands into my pockets and sure enough, there they were. So I pull them out and stand ready to pay for them, meanwhile I ask the girl, "Why didn't you say something earlier? [i.e., when I'd first done it?] And she'd just shrugged. I guess she hadn't wanted to call me a thief to my face when I was providing her and her brother with a place to live at reduced rent.

But that's what happened. I had put the bottles into my coat pockets, presumably because I hadn't wanted to put them into their cart, because it was their cart, and yet within the 5 or 10 minutes it took us to get to the check out line, I'd totally forgotten that I'd done that.

And I'm sure you reading this have had a similar experience. How many times do we put our car keys down, and then, an hour later, have to spend hours and hours looking for them because we can't remember where we put them?

I'm not saying that people don't shoplift - obviously they do. I'm just saying that depending on the circumstances - at least those revealed in the newspaper articles - sometimes I'm inclined to believe the accused rather than the accuser.