Sally’s Memory

You all are reading Sally Thomas, over at the Icons & Curiosities blog, aren’t you? Here she is —setting up a thought about Mary Magdelene:

As I was waking up this morning, swimming into consciousness and daylight, something came to me, and it seemed illustrative: something I did when I was eleven, which I’d forgotten about until now.

I’d gone with some people I knew slightly to a horse show. A girl I was with was riding in one of the classes, and when we got there, she gave me a five-dollar bill and told me to register her for the class. She was older than I was, and I was in awe of her, so I took the money and went to do what she’d asked, even though I had no idea how, exactly, one registered a person for a horse-show class. Also, I was so paralytically shy that there was no way I would ever ask a stranger what to do . . . .

As it soon transpired, I’d signed the girl up for the wrong class. She’d meant to exhibit in English Equitation, and I’d registered her for barrel racing, as became evident when the show announcer invited her to “come a-runnin!” And then there was the matter of the five dollars. Apparently I’d been supposed to bring back change. When asked to produce it, I panicked. Just how stupidly I had bungled the registration thing was already clear to me; I couldn’t admit that to this girl. She’d think I was an idiot. So I did the logical thing: I rifled my pockets in a frenzy of pretended searching, then said I must have lost it.

I was so busy feeling stupid that what everyone with me must actually have thought didn’t occur to me until much later. Of course my pretense at searching had been transparent; of course they thought I’d stolen the money, all two dollars and fifty cents, or whatever it was, and gotten myself a Coke or something. When they questioned me pointedly that night, I stuck lamely to my lame story; the time or two that I saw the same girl afterwards, she made remarks which indicated that I was a person not to be trusted, which I accepted because it was true, though not in the way that she thought. The incident ate at me for a while, but eventually I had other things to think about, and after a meeting or two I never saw her again.

One of the best writers we have.