At the age of five or six, I went with my parents to a hardware store, where I proceeded to demand that they buy me some cheap wooden curio. My parents said no. So when they weren’t looking, I stuffed the thing in my sock. Back home, my parents spotted the bulge. I was nabbed–and ashamed. My father drove me back to the hardware store and made me put back what I had taken. It was my one and only personal experience with shoplifting. I learned two important lessons: 1) Don’t shoplift. It’s wrong. 2. If you must shoplift, for goodness sake don’t put the darn thing in your sock!