Moral codes applicable for all ages

MICHELE MARR

Last month, when news that Eric Nordmark had been freed from jail

reached the public, it created quite a buzz, and for a couple of

weeks afterward I found myself discussing the story with family,

neighbors, friends and even a handful of strangers waiting along with

me in doctors’ offices.

Nordmark, a 36-year-old drifter, was arrested and on trial for

charges of assault and child molestation after three 11-year-old

girls accused him of attacking them in a Garden Grove park.

Then two days into his trial, one of the girls confessed to her

mother that the story was concocted to keep her and her two friends

out of trouble for coming home late after school. Nordmark was

released, but he had already spent 251 days in jail.

“It’s your worst nightmare,” most of the people I talked with told

me. To be accused of something you didn’t do, something despicable to

you. To know you’re innocent, yet no one believes you; no one will so

much as listen to you.

Everyone speculated about how well the three young girls had

understood what they were doing. Did they know lying was wrong? Did

they know what could happen to an innocent man if he were convicted

of the charges they had brought against him?

At least one attorney who spoke about the case suggested the girls

weren’t malicious, merely immature.

Patti Lee, an attorney in the juvenile division of the San

Francisco public defender’s office, characterized the events as “an

adolescent tale gone awry.” The girls did what a lot of preteens do

to protect their own backsides; they lied.

Maybe. But with some unusually grave consequences. The girls’

sentencing a few days ago created a buzz again.

I can remember a time when I was sorely tempted to cook up a tale

to get myself out of some trouble I’d gotten myself in.

It was in the mid-1950s and topper coats were in high style. I

had, much to my joy, gotten one for Easter. It was white wool,

perhaps alpaca; it resembled fur and had half-dollar-size, white

mother-of-pearl buttons.

The coat was meant to last me more than a year, at least until I

outgrew it. So the rule was, I could only wear it to Sunday school

and church. But some weeks after Easter, I begged and pleaded for

permission to wear it to school.

My mother relented, on one condition: I go straight to school

without stopping to play in the woods and come home the same way.

“Yes, yes!” I agreed. I walked to school on the gravel path that

rose through the woods without the least temptation to wander off to

gather late inkberries or look for pollywogs.

But only yards down the path on my way home, I spotted some wild

violets and couldn’t bear to pass them up. I wandered farther and

farther into the woods picking a sweet elfin bouquet.

Before I knew it, the sun was telling me I was overdue at home. If

I walked back to the head of the clear gravel path that would take me

home, I’d be all the later. Or I could cut through the woods and pick

up the gravel path farther down.

Soon, I was standing at the root-end of a fallen tree that had

formed a natural bridge over a shallow stream. I usually shinnied

across the bridge in the early spring when it was still slick with

moss, but my school dress and white topper weren’t any good for

shinnying.

Late as it was though, I had to press on. So I scuffed a spot of

moss off the log and took my first step. Then scuffing and stepping

and scuffing and stepping, I took another and another.

With my violets in one hand and my lunchbox in the other, I almost

made it to the other side. I was thinking about how surprising my

mother with the violets I’d picked would make up for my being late

when I tumbled.

Lying beneath the natural bridge with one foot in the icy stream

and the rest of me making a crude mud angel on its bank, my thoughts

began to chase.

A monster ran me into the woods. No, no, no. Monsters aren’t real.

A mean and scary bunch of kids -- no I’d never seen them before, not

kids from around here ... no, no ... my friends, my friends picked me

up and carried me into the woods and dropped me into the stream

because they were ... they were jealous ... that’s it ... they were

jealous of my topper!

I was desperately looking for a way out of the mess I’d gotten

myself in when some other words started rising above my own

imaginings.

“Whatever you do, don’t lie to me. However much you think you’re

in trouble, you aren’t in as much trouble as you’ll be if you lie to

me. Whatever the truth is, you are best off telling it.”

I was flat in the mud wearing my new Easter coat listening to my

mother as though she were at home waiting, no doubt anxiously, for me

to arrive. The only way out of the fix I’d gotten myself in was to go

on home and tell the truth. I knew it, and I was 8 years old.

If those three 11-year-old girls who accused Nordmark didn’t know

that, maybe it’s as much our shame as theirs.

In a culture that clamors as much for freedom from religion as

freedom of religion and looks at the Ten Commandments more as a relic

than a moral code, we still expect people, even children, to know

right from wrong and how to take the moral high road, but we keep

redrawing the map.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.