via Daily Prompt: Confess

If I do something wrong, I almost always confess. I cannot bear carrying around guilt. To my knowledge, I only have two things on my conscience that I haven’t confessed. They happened years ago — one of them happened when I was in elementary school. For the first and only time, I copied an answer from another student’s test. The answer was “The Holy Experiment.” I will never forget that. And the other thing, which I did many decades later, involved a lie I told to a close friend. I will never be able to right these wrongs. My fourth-grade teacher, if she’s even alive, would be flabbergasted to get a call from me regarding my cheating, and I still don’t have the guts to tell my friend I lied to her. So, these two things will have to be reconciled in my next life.

This Christmas, my husband gave me a pile of wonderful gifts … and the Clapper. I refuse to have the Clapper in the house. I will not turn my lights on and off by clapping my hands. Every time I think of the Clapper, I remember an episode of “Roseanne,” where Roseanne Conner, or maybe Dan, clapped her, or his, hands to turn on the lights. I refuse to own anything that Roseanne’s family owned. I can’t even buy plaid furniture because of their plaid couch with the black-bordered granny-square afghan hanging over the back. I remember one of the female actors hugging a male actor and asking him what he smelled of. The answer was, “the couch.”

I have to confess, though, that I love granny squares. The hippies were about 10 years older than I was as a kid and I admired the girls with their long, straight, center-parted hair and their granny-square vests and sweaters. I have crocheted lots of granny squares over the years, but I have never used black yarn in them. To me, the black-border screams “low-class,” because of the afghan on the Conners’ couch.

Anyway, back to the Clapper. My husband asked me when I was going to hook it up and I said, “Never.” I explained that I loved his other gifts but not that one, because it was trashy. I told him that there was a list, on Amazon’s “Clapper” page, of things that people who bought the Clapper also purchased, and a light for the inside of the toilet and a Chia pet were featured. My husband said, “I almost got you a Chia pet.”

I shuddered and then told him that he could have the Clapper. He said, “I don’t want it. Do you think I’m trashy?” I said, “Of course not.”

I didn’t ask him if he wanted a light for the toilet or a Chia pet, though.

Addendum: My husband said that the Clapper was a joke gift, and he didn’t get why I didn’t get that.