“Celeste, I don’t want you going to Coney Island today. It’s the Fourth of July, and who knows what kind of troublemakers will be there?”

My friend Carl and I were planning to spend July 4, 1978, at Coney Island, riding roller coasters, playing Skee-Ball and exploring the beach. It was going to be a wonderful day, and I wasn’t going to let my mom spoil it. To get Mom to stop hounding me, I fibbed: I told her that Carl and I would go to a local park instead.

A short time later, Carl and I were on a Coney Island-bound train. It was a long ride, but we figured it would be worth the trip. And it was.

We rode the Ferris wheel, looked through tower binoculars, and played carnival games; we ate Nathan’s hot dogs, collected seashells on the beach, and got jostled in bumper cars.

The most memorable part of the day was riding the Cyclone, a wooden roller coaster that gave a famously bumpy ride. I screamed when the coaster car climbed, I screamed when it descended, I screamed when it hopped. I must have been mid-scream when the jolt at the bottom of a steep drop caused my upper teeth to smash into my lower lip. By the time I exited the ride, palm pressed against my gashed lip, I was a bloody mess.

Carl lent me his cloth handkerchief and sat me down on a park bench, where he listened sympathetically to my hanky-muffled exclamations of “Ow, ow, ow!”

“Here,” Carl said after a short time. “Let me buy you a treat to cheer you up.”

“Just get me some ice,” I replied. 

“No, no, you deserve something special. What’s your pleasure?”

“Ice.”

“Okay, ice. And I’ll surprise you with something else too, okay?”  

Carl walked off and returned a few minutes later with a cup of ice and a small cardboard tray. 

The ice numbed my swollen lip. It felt good. Carl offered me a taste of the “special treat.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Taste it and see if you can guess!”

I tasted it and immediately felt a searing pain in my gashed lip. Had there been a roof above me, my head would have hit it.

“Oh my gosh, what is that stuff?” 

Bewildered, Carl replied, “Clams.” 

It hadn’t occurred to Carl that salty clams might trigger fresh pain in my lip. As for me, the old adage about “rubbing salt in a wound” had suddenly become agonizingly relatable.

It was time to go home.

The train ride to the Bronx was uneventful, although it seemed to me that passengers kept stealing glances at my bruised and impressively swollen lip. When I arrived home, my mom said nothing about my distended lip. Maybe she didn’t notice, but it’s more likely that she had chosen not to ask about it.  Even so, I was not “off the hook,” at least not spiritually. I had been disobedient. I had been dishonest.  And while Carl had meant well, his question, “What’s your pleasure?” had unsettled me. It seemed to say, What treat or trinket, diversion or distraction will help you to forget the painful consequences of your wrongdoing?  

My lip hurt, but so did my conscience.

St. John Henry Newman described conscience as “a messenger of him who ... speaks to us behind a veil.” It is nothing less than God’s voice, helping us to choose right over wrong. 

The roller coaster episode left a scar on my lip. The scar is an ever-present reminder to “strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and man” (Acts 24:16). Throughout life’s climbs, descents and hops, it’s an ideal we are each called to pursue.