Making Amends

A friend pointed out the following classified ad in the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine (September-October 2010, p. 69): I stole your cufflinks. Summer 1980. Shepard Street. Write newfreedom.how@gmail.com to arrange their return.

If the thief was an undergraduate at the time of the theft, he would be about 50 today. He might have been a graduate student, though, since Shepard Street is off campus. So maybe he's 60 by now. Or maybe he wasn't a student at all - a drinking buddy met at a bar? But hold on, might not the thief have been a woman? If so, perhaps she was upset by the end of a love affair or even by the man's lack of interest after a one-night stand. Maybe she stole the cufflinks in revenge. Or maybe, unable to part from her lover without some remembrance of him, she took his cuff links as a keepsake.

What about the victim of the theft? He was a probably a young man, although women sometimes wear cufflinks too. My guess is that by now he's forgotten all about the cufflinks, whereas the thief has not. Whether or not the theft has bothered the thief's conscience all these years - the culprit might also have forgotten about the cufflinks until coming upon them unexpectedly while, say, cleaning out a closet - the thief is finally trying to make amends.

I hope that the person whose cufflinks were stolen reads the ad, remembers the theft, and writes to the e-mail address supplied. The chances are good, though, that he won't look at the notice. If he's like me, he usually reads only the class notes and the obituaries. If so, the thief will never be able to make amends and the theft will forever weigh on the wrongdoer's conscience. A suitable punishment, you say?

Listen, nobody's perfect, and as Yom Kippur approaches, I think about my past sins and hope that the people I've offended during the past year will forgive me. It's too late to ask forgiveness from people I've wronged in the distant past, but if I could, I too would place a personal advertisement in Harvard Magazine. The trouble is, though, that I'd need to publish lots of different messages in lots of different magazines and papers, so it's just as well I can't.