Sometimes as an icebreaker at the beginning of the semester I ask students to write stories about themselves and to share them with their classmates. All of the stories but one has to be true. The game is to find the lie.

So all but one of the following tales is true.

Which one is a lie?

My younger sister was born when I was two. She had a heart condition requiring frequent at home doctor visits and her care became paramount to my mother. We lived in Batesville, Arkansas where my father was the prosecuting attorney. His office was downtown perhaps three blocks from our house.

When feeling ignored by my mother I would set off to find daddy at work. Sometimes I found his office. Sometimes I ended up at the grocery store or bank. The grocer or banker knowing my sister’s condition would entertain me until my father could pick me up.  Sometimes that took awhile if it was a court day.

I was jealous of my sister and when my mother wasn’t watching I would take her out in the yard and leave her there. When my panicked parents discovered her missing they would ask, “Where is Erin?” and I would answer, “She’s gone. She doesn’t live here now.”

Shortly after our marriage my ex-husband the former policeman took me to target practice to learn to properly shoot his Glock 19. He kept this gun in the glove compartment of his convertible Mustang. Keeping guns in cars is not an uncommon practice in Miami. One afternoon I was in the front yard picking mangoes.

The ten-year-old across the street was leaving her house to walk her little dog in nearby Merrie Christmas park. The electric fence for the neighbor’s guard dogs had failed and they were running the neighborhood.

I retrieved the Glock from the glove compartment and shot the guard dog just as he was about to pounce on the ten-year-old and her little dog.

I met Rich at Rehobeth Beach in Deleware when visiting with friends the summer I was 15. His father was a coach for the Philadelphia Eagles. On our first date (the best date of my life) we walked along the beach to the boardwalk to see Star Wars at an old movie theater and then walked home that night along the starry beach.

His family lived outside the city in West Chester. He worked at a scooter store and earned extra money mowing the yard of a weird old guy named Andrew who painted.

For years he would send a Christmas card each year that he wrote on Christmas day at the beach where his family shared a house with one of the former Eagles football players.

I was doing the weekly grocery shopping at the Winn-Dixie in South Miami. I turned to go down the soda/potato chip aisle and my cart nearly hit a long-haired skinny man wearing dirty jeans and t-shirt. He was holding a very large bag of Lay’s potato chips and was startled by my cart.

He grabbed the bag of chips, crunching them to his chest and said, “Don’t tell anyone I’m here.” I said, “No problem dude” and headed down the aisle to get some Cokes.

Fifteen minutes in the checkout line all the cashiers were thrilled that Brad Pitt had just been there. Remember all that long hair he had in Legends of the Fall? He does not glow in person. He looks like a homeless man stealing potato chips.