Truth be told, he was far less concerned with punishment than he was about learning and developing internal discipline in order to be able to live up to your responsibilities. But he understood the value of using italics and underscores when writing to communicate, of using volume and inflection when speaking, and his physical disciplines were effectively just that.
Many of dad’s common punishments were considered even back then as just “urban legends”. But at our house, they were real and carried with them the impetus to take some time, perhaps sitting uncomfortably on an extra pillow, or holding hands under cool water to ease the friction blisters worked up between shovel handle and palms, while thinking about the situation that got us thus afflicted.
Early on I remember Dad checking our “bed-making skills” by bouncing a quarter, and if it didn’t bounce high enough, we were given the opportunity to practice some more.
Dad went through a phase of sending us to our rooms without dinner, until he realized that we didn’t mind and (foolishly) never whined about being hungry. Of course, each of us had stashes of food in our room as preparation for “hard times” knowing that it was a question of when, not if, we would need them. My personal storehouse consisted of several cans of Shasta Soda, some dried jerky, dried apricots and peaches, a dozen or so either molasses or chocolate chip cookies, a pint jar of apricots, and second pint jar of peaches, a small jar of honey and usually some pilot biscuits.
Dad had been a Sargent in the Army, and I guess he hadn’t gone to tactical school, because he never seemed to understand that to impact the enemy, you have to cut his supply lines.
We three boys were always in a hurry to get where we were going. Because of that, out the front door, down the sidewalk and around the corner took far too long for us if we were headed north and so, we would head out the back door and jump the fence.
Dad was none too fond of our fence “jumping” activities, cause truth be told, we never really jumped a fence in our lives. Sure, we went over lots of fences, but all of them suffered in the process. Either the upright 4 x 4s got yanked, tugged, and pushed, or the fence boards got kicked, scuffed, and shoe-marked, and of course the odd redwood plank would end up split, or broken after a train of hands, feet and ample muscle heaved up and over the supposed barrier.
One night he’d had enough, so he sentenced us to stand on a top rail for 45 minutes.
Imagine the framework only of a fence. 4 x 4 uprights cemented into the ground, rising 5 and a half feet. Top and bottom runners in place, with the top rail consisting of a 2 x 4 positioned so that the 3-1/2” side was faced up. No upright fence boards yet, just top rails and uprights.
Each of us boys was stationed in the middle of a top rail, half way between the upright posts, feet at 90 degree angles to the line of the top rail.
Balance is rather sketchy in a situation such as that. Your heels are where you get your “solid stance”, but what with the spring in the top rail, one needed ones fine adjust toes involved. So we all ended up with the balls of our feet and part of our toes on the top rail.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t been up there with those other two nit wits, but fact was, there were three of us critically dependent on a dynamic system. Every time one of the others would shift his weight, my section of top rail would bounce, and I would struggle to keep my balance. Dad was inside where it was comfortable and warm, we were out where it was uncomfortable and if “unwarm” isn’t an Adverb, it really should be.
I’ve never understood what was going through Dad’s head that night. It is impossible for me to see how he thought that session was going to end up, but I do know how it ended. One of the nimrods I’m related to got to bouncing up and down. His motivation (unlike Dad’s) I instantly got. His goal was to knock the other two of us off of our top rails. Likely had this half-baked though that Dad would hear the noise as boy one and boy two fell screaming to separate face plants, come outside, and give Brother one “time off” for still being on this top rail while the other two of us were slacking.
Only problem with the plan was that all three of us had climbed fences together. We’d climbed trees together. We’d thrown ourselves off of the same bleachers, houses, and cliffs. We were in short all pretty nimble and quick. Thus we both rode out the resulting bounces and wobbles.
So he ramped up to higher bounces, and higher bounces, until on coming down from his highest bounce yet, his top rail simply split in two dumping him on the ground.
And while Dad may not have been clairvoyant enough to anticipate this little hiccup in his disciplinary plan, it was quite apparent that he immediately recognized the error of his ways on responding to the caterwauling coming off the ground. Brother two and I were thankfully paroled. Not because of any “good behavior” on our part, more because Dad didn’t want to rebuild the remaining two sections of fence as well.
And I can tell you stories of fence painting, being “loaned out” to weed neighbor’s yards, writing essays and any number of other regular “behavior modifiying activities” that Dad employed, but ba far, his favorite was having us dig holes in the yard.
It was part of the reason my brothers and I always assumed someone forgot to tell Dad he had been discharged from the army. What with “Quarter-toss” bed checks, spit-shined shoes every week, and Dinnertime verbal exercises, Dad was an adherent in 3’ x 3’ x 3’ holes dug in the rocky soil of the back yard.
The one thing I can say about the hole digging endeavor was that once you got a bit of experience, cutting a clean right angle cornered, level floored hole out of the ground got much easier with practice. It might be that was because our hands grew strong. It might be that our arms and backs grew powerful. It might be that all that sieving to remove rocks made the ground softer. It might be all three.
All I know is that in my life, I have never met another individual (other than Barry or Jeff, who could handle a shovel with the efficiency and exactitude as I can. Turned out to be good practice, I’ve had to dig cars out of sand pits when they sunk to the frame, I’ve had to dig any number of backpack trails in rocky hillsides, and light pole bases, and what not. And I’ve had to re-sculpt the ever failing slope behind my house to keep the house from being thrown off of the hillside it is perched on.
All because my Dad was the World’s Greatest Disciplinarian.
© Copyright 2018, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved
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