You threw what in the toilet?

One afternoon, I walked into the house after work to find the kind of informal courtroom setting that most parents have learned can be essential to child rearing. Cindy, was sitting in the living room with James seated on the ottoman in front of her. The feeling in the room was serious and the tone of her voice was authoritative. “Tell me the truth” she was saying, as I walked in. “I tell the truf”, James replied. At this point I was brought in as a second questioner. Cindy explained what I did not know. The suspicion was that James who had locked himself into the bathroom with Coco’s cell phone only to emerge with no phone after a flush a minute later, had flushed the phone down the toilet. I said sternly, “James, tell me the truth. Did you flush the cell phone and it went away?” He looked up at me over his glasses and mumbled, “A little bit.” Now how you flush a phone “a little bit” is known only to James. The real truth is that the answer was yes and he was guilty but was trying to minimize his offense with careful wording. It actually sounds a lot like the rest of us. We are very prone and quite expert at minimizing or redefining our mistakes.

One post script to the story is that while Coco was very upset to no longer have a phone, she handled it with a lot of grace. Her gracious response gave way to out and out jubilation when I told her that I had ordered a new phone, one much better than the one that got “A little bit flushed.”