Not sure why these thoughts are runnin' through my head. Maybe it's cuz I've been sleeping in a place with no locks on the doors for the last few weeks. Maybe cuz I'm going home soon, and it feels kinda icky. Maybe cuz I have felt so secure and so trusted that it's made me look back over my whole life and think about those moments (and we all have them) when I just took advantage.

Thankfully, it's been quite a long time since I scammed somebody like that.

I remember it like it was yesterday, though.

Ever since I was kid, I've been what I guess you could call "enterprising". I was always trying to raise money for some scheme, or because I just had to have the latest UV light for my microscope or parts from Radio Shack for the thing I was going to sneak up onto the roof at night and "install", against the speciifc warnings of my mom, to great danger to myself and -- usually -- afoul of the FCC. I was about 11 one Summer, and it was the fourth of July. A few nights before, I had discovered my mom's tampons under the bathroom sink and did not know what they were. The thread hanging off one end made them look kinda fireworksy to me. So I had the brilliant idea that I would sell them -- whatever they were -- to the kids from 2 blocks away, for a buck a pop, as the latest, greatest thing that went bang.

When I was 11, 2 blocks away was like another county. I seldom saw these kids and they didn't know where I lived. So, I figured they would find out they were not fireworks and -- in the 4th of July merriment and general confusion -- they would forget about me. I would have made like $14 profit and could buy the parts for my latest weapon of mass mischief.

To my great shame, that's exactly what happened. I think I saw some of those kids a week later, and they didn't say anything to me. I began to seek them out, because I was confused and then intensely curious to find out what had happened.

They never told me and I never got over my guilt.

I think the lesson for me was that the difference between good people and bad people was that bad people could forget what they had done, somehow.

I began to feel better about myself as the years passed and I realized I could not forget the things I did that I thought might be bad, and pretty soon I stopped even trying to get away with anything.

A different kind of "good" feeling crept inside me, and I knew it was not a good feeling that bad people could ever have.

Because I had been a bad person on that day, with my ill-gotten $14 in my hand, I knew exactly what their good feeling was like.

I decided mine was much, much better --