Walking stories

True or False? The truth of the matter

June 3, 2025

Don’t you dare think that anyone who has yanked herself off the garish carousel of nine to five employment is without a sense of purpose.

I like to set destinations for my walks with Greenberg. In olden days, I’d do a week’s shopping in one supermarket outing, loading bags crammed with provisions into the trunk of the car and dragging them up the stairs to our house. Nowadays, I stroll to the market – seven blocks or so – and, even though I know I’ll be there the next day to pick up a quart of milk, all I’ll purchase is a jar of mayonnaise. It’s an inefficient routine, but it fosters getting some fresh air, boosts the daily step-count, and provides Greenberg with an array of sidewalk spots to befoul (rest assured, I always stoop to unbefoul them).

One favorite destination, at least weekly, is the Goodwill on Haight Street (recently reorganized, to the disapproval of regulars like me). At this point in my life, I don’t need clothes or dishes or really anything else that one can expect to find there. But sometimes I unearth treasure, the spotting of which – an Hermes scarf, for example – makes me feel both discerning and, more important to a woman in a constant panic over lack of tech skills, competent.

What I found on a recent Senior Discount Day foray doesn’t exactly qualify as treasure, but would, I thought, add a sparkle to my domestic endeavors. The expenditure was $3.50, for a pair of brightly-flowered plastic slip-on shoes I could picture nestled into a corner next to our back door. I think they were meant to be swim shoes, but I had other ideas. “For gardening,” I said to the clerk as she rang up the purchase.

The old lady – it takes one to know one – who had been in front of me at the cash register had been lingering for a bit as she tucked her wallet into her tote bag, so she overheard that remark. And as I turned from the cashier to leave, the lady, her face as wrinkled as her bohemian clothes (again, this is the Haight), she approached me.

“Are you a gardener?” she asked, with a tentative smile on her face. “A little bit,” I said.

“Can you answer a question for me?” she continued. “I’m really just a beginner,” I said, returning her grin to show I am friendly, but not at all expert. “But try me.”

She asked about cutting back sage, a meager knowledge of which I shared in about 30 seconds. Then she asked me another question, about geraniums, I think. I was less able to answer, and I apologized.

“I hope you don’t mind me taking up too much of your time,” she said. I shook my head no, broadening my smile to show her I am a nice person, and thinking, oh God, she’s not going to follow me down the street, will she?

“Just one more thing,” she said, pausing for a moment before revealing what was on her mind perhaps even more than proper use of the pruning shears. “You have such nice teeth. Are they really yours?”

___________________________________________________________________________

The worst trouble I ever got into in my childhood was when I ate half a banana, threw away the other half, and then, in response to her inquiry, told my mother that I’d eaten it all. The denouement to this incident, after my mother had happened to glance into the garbage pail (this was before the age of separating and recycling), featured a succession of unpleasant things: My mother’s gasping at the specific discovery, her denouncement of me as a no-account liar, the slap on the face that was the usual result of her losing her temper, my sobbing about both having been discovered and the shame of it all, and finally, her loud, forceful and unrelenting sermon about the sin of throwing away food.

I got the message. Do not lie. And always finish your banana.

(Thinking this over at this particular time in history, I wonder if the mother of the man in the Oval Office ever took him to the woodshed in Queens for lying about his half-eaten banana. Hey, dirty-minded readers: Stop right there.)

As we grow up, however, most of us, from time to time (see how I am whitewashing), lie. We know it’s wrong, and we feel guilty about it, unlike the Oval Office occupant. But we do it, in the best cases for kind reasons. I have a fondness for weird clothes, and when something shocks a passerby into staring, most of the time, that person – not wanting to be perceived as staring at a monstrosity – will say, “hey, nice skirt.” You tell a friend with a pimple on her chin that she’s looking radiant; you tell a friend whose hairline has moved from the peak of his forehead to the top of his head that he hasn’t aged a bit. “Oh, we can’t, we’re busy that night” may be real, or it may be the busy-ness is finally soaking and scouring away the orange pulp that adhered itself to the inside of the glasses the last time you made Mimosas.

Even Greenberg lies, habitually in fact. In general, he’s an upstanding dog, not attempting to make light of his honest responses to pigeons and skateboards. But a whiff of a treat in a human’s hand sends him into his imitation-of-a-good-dog act, involving such canine phony-baloney postures as sitting on his haunches, head cocked, back straight, tail wagging. He is dissembling.

If most of us tell lies to people we know, virtually all of us impart lies every day to people we don’t know, strangers with whom we trade random glimp[ses. Contact lenses, Spanx, push-up bras, fake eyelashes, lipstick. Orthodox Jewish women lop off their hair, so as to cover its beauty, and then cover the result with wigs, so as to cover the close cropping. Do two lies make a truth? And ladies, if you’re looking for a man who doesn’t use a razor to shave his face or shape his beard, you’ll have to find a Taliban dating service.

Maybe 30 years ago, I went with a friend to visit an elderly novelist living at a senior residence in Marin. It was mid-morning, and as we parked out front, I turned to my companion and said, “She’s really nice, and she’ll be happy to see us. But if she asks us to stay for lunch, please tell her, or I will tell her, that we have a date with someone else.” Call me mean, but the food at this place was awful, the visitee was an uncommonly slow eater, and I didn”t want to be stuck there for hours. My friend stared at me. “You’ll have to tell her that,” she said, “because I never lie.” She says today that she has no recollection of that conversation. I think it's a miracle we’re still friends.

____________________________________________________________________________

So there I was, standing in the doorway of the Goodwill on Haight Street, looking at this friendly lady and pondering my teeth. In a flash, I was calling up mental images of posts and implants and veneers and crowns and everything else that my beloved dentists had hurled into my wide-opened maw and glued in, with hopes that these polished geegaws would achieve the status of permanent residence there.

I considered whether I wanted to share my dental reminiscences with my new acquaintance or for that matter, with anyone (except you Substack readers). A few feet away, the visiting wide-eyed tourists and tattooed glitterati native to the street shuffled along.

I lied.

,.