I was conned by the best

At the risk of sounding dusty and nostalgic by writing about the old days, I am going to reach back into the dim past to the years when all of my kids were still at home and I was trying to keep the family functioning and the household solvent.

But with my kids, I didn’t have a chance. They were con artists. I don’t know how they got to be con persons. (Back then it was okay to call all of them “con men” regardless of their gender.) They didn’t learn it from me. I can’t even spin about what time we are having dinner. But they could talk a golf pro out of his clubs.

This is how they ran the trip-to-the-water-slide scam:

“Mom, can we go to the water slide today? Okay, hey you guys (loud enough for the neighbors to hear), we’re going to the water slide! Everybody get ready. I get the blue beach towel. We’re leaving at one o’clock. Mom, I’m inviting three friends.”

In case you didn’t notice, this was a one-sided conversation. It took only one set of quotation marks to repeat it. There aren’t any other sets because I wasn’t allowed to participate. I barely collected my senses in time to grab the phone out of the kid’s hand and say, “No you’re not. You’re only inviting two friends.”

Here is how I remember that the get-a-new-toy swindle worked:

“Mom, if I get all of my work done can we go to the store and look at baseball cards? I have my own money.”

“All right then, get your work done, and I’m going to check it.”

The mistake I made was in picking up on the “work” part of the proposal. I felt pretty safe because there was a ninety-to-one chance that he wouldn’t get his work done until after the stores were closed three days later. And the part about his having his own money didn’t escape me either.

But about an hour later I was confronted with a clean room and a deal I made. So we went to the card store, and the kid looked at the cards and picked out a few packs, all the while reminding me that he had brushed his teeth three times the day before, didn’t get any Legos for his birthday the year before, and that he got a couple of “As” on his first-grade report card.

When we got to the checkout counter, after the cards were rung up, the trap was sprung. “That will be $6.79, please.”

“Okay, where’s your money?”

“All my money’s in the bank. You know that, Mom; you made me put it there. Remember?”

(I don’t think, to this day, that I have been paid back.)

Then there was the get-a-ride-home-from-anywhere hijack which went like this:

I got a phone call, usually after my bedtime.

“Mom, can you come and get us?’

“I thought you were getting a ride home with your cousin.”

“He had to go to work.”

“Well, you will have to walk home then.” (We didn’t live twenty miles from town then.)

“Mom, we can’t walk home in the dark. Somebody might kidnap us. What are you going to tell Suzie’s mom if we get kidnapped?”

I know—it was tempting.)

At least I didn’t say that those were the good old days.

Okay, I know what you are thinking—that I deserved what I got. I should have been smarter or at least tougher than the kids. In my own defense, I can say none of them grew up to be actual con men. I think that they are all dumber than their own kids though.