Believe me, I’m no saint. I have on occasion violated a Commandment or two (it’s always been hard for me not to covet once in a while). But when it comes to that one about stealing, I have always taken it very seriously. Heck, I actually bought and paid for Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book. Where did this extreme ethical rule come from? I have no idea, though I don’t recall my parents ever stealing anything, except perhaps my childhood.

Beyond the ethical violation involved in stealing, another thing that stopped me was the fear of getting caught. From what I’ve seen, getting caught can really ruin your day. For some, though, there is a thrill in the possibility of getting caught. Well, guess the thrill is in “getting away with,” which is the opposite of getting caught. But if there were no possibility of the “caught” part, the “getting away with” would hold no excitement. In my day, kids played “cops and robbers.” They didn’t play “ethicists and do-gooders.”

But I did steal something once. I feel awkward confessing it here in print, but since it was back in 1967 or ’68, I assume that the statute of limitations has run its course. Of course, I will worry now that one or both of my friends might never see me the same way, but I’ve just kept this in too long.

I stole a nail.

I was in the hardware section of a Sears department store, and I needed a nail, one nail. There was an open container of nails, selling at 10 for a penny. I think the minimum purchase was 50 or 100 nails, and I could have handled that, but there was a long line waiting to check out, and I was in a rush.

So after glancing around to make sure the store detective was nowhere to be seen (this was years before there were video cameras watching your every move), I took a nail and put it in my pocket. Yes, I had stolen something.

Sure, I felt guilty, but I needed a nail and I didn’t have time to wait on line. Please don’t hate me. I never stole anything else. And, believe me, there was no thrill in that successful theft. I didn’t go from nails to screws and then on to hammers and screwdrivers.

Perhaps the most telling sign of my absolute adherence to the Eighth Commandment is that I never forgot that purloined nail. Sure it was worth a tenth of a cent (which would be half a cent in today’s dollars), but it was the principle of the thing. Yes, it was the ’60s, and as Abbie Hoffman’s book title showed, lots of hippies felt that it was perfectly okay to steal from corporations because they were destroying us. But while many hippie ideas about politics -- not to mention their ideas about pot and free love -- had a great deal of appeal to me, stealing from anyone, even Sears (whose connection with American foreign policy was quite tangential, as I recall) was just not right.

As overdeveloped as my superego was about stealing, it had not been so finely honed earlier in my life when it came to cheating on exams. I know that by admitting this, I am now forfeiting any hope I still retain about someday becoming president of the United States, not to mention governor of our state, so I want to say to my younger readers, Please don’t try to justify your own cheating by saying, “Well, if my idol, Mark Sherman, could do it, so can I!”

I never cheated on an exam until junior high school, when such behavior was rampant in at least one of my classes. The cheating was blatant; I think the teacher had put us on the honor system, which seems absurd when applied to 12-year-olds. As I recall, taking exams became almost a group exercise, and I think I would have been ostracized had I not taken part. As a relative newcomer to the school (we had moved when I was midway through seventh grade), I felt I had to do anything I could to fit in.

When I started high school, I continued to occasionally look at nearby test papers, until one day in biology class, the teacher -- a man (and everyone knows how scary they can be) -- said, and I knew he meant me, “I see someone looking at his neighbor’s paper, and if he keeps doing it, I’ll take away his paper and he’ll get an F.”

That was it for me. I put my eyes squarely on my own paper, and I never cheated on an exam again, ever. In fact, I started applying to exams the same over-the-top ethics I had always applied to stealing. Once, seated in the front row of a class, I could see the answer sheet on the teacher’s desk directly in front of me, and I purposely looked away!

I was definitely the kind of high school kid that classmates could hate. But I say to them now, Listen, I did cheat on exams when I was 12, and later, in my 20s, I stole a nail. I wasn’t the goody two-shoes you all thought. Just like everyone else, I have to live with my checkered past.