Mr. Cline called me a liar. And in front of his whole class at the community college, where, when I wasn’t changing diapers and reading storybooks, I was taking one class and then another on my way toward a teaching degree.
Instantly, I was back in my elementary school playground, where kids dealt with a perceived untruth by surrounding the suspected fibber.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” they’d chant. “Your tongue’s as long as a telephone wire.”
The words sounded dire. And I never understood how the accused could possibly have the gall to chant back: “I don’t care. I don’t care. I can buy another pair.”
I certainly had no such audacity, as I stood accused in front of my college classmates.
Mr. Cline taught by rules, one of which being that, if you were late for class on a quiz day, you took an automatic F.
I had tried to arrive on time, rising early to nurse a baby and dress a toddler and throw something in the crockpot for dinner. And I had walked out the door exactly on time.
But halfway down our brick sidewalk, I stopped and stared. The car wasn’t in the driveway.
Steve looked up in surprise when I walked back into the house.
“Where’s the car?” I asked.
He finished pushing a pin through Ann Marie’s diaper, picked her up, and walked to the window.
We stared at each other.
I took the city bus to class, arriving fifteen minutes late.
“Could I please take the quiz?” I asked. “Our car was stolen out of our driveway.”
“Yeah, right!” he said.
And that’s when the ill-boding chant rose in my mind: “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
Later, after I got over having earned an F, I fell to wondering about the origins of the chant.
Turns out it had once been even more ominous.
In 1810, William Blake, of “Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright,” wrote:
“Deceiver, dissembler
Your trousers are alight
From what pole or gallows
Shall they dangle in the night?”
And later, in 1841, an unknown author got even more explicit:
Liar, liar, lick spit.
Turn about the candlestick.
What’s good for a liar?
Brimstone and fire.
Someone hit with these words isn’t likely to confess a falsehood. And if the goal is to get to the truth, pronouncing judgement doesn’t help. I’ve found in my decades of teaching that what got me closer to the truth was asking honest and good-hearted questions.
Mr. Cline was incurious, choosing to see only one sliver of truth in my life—the moment I walked into class late. And he refused to widen his view by asking questions and hearing my words.
The car was found. Six months after it disappeared, the police called us. It was in a field near a woods, stripped of its tires, engine, radio, and battery.
Buying another car gouged into our meager finances.
But somehow, being called a liar left the bigger hole.
Apple to Apple 