Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
he received an awful lot of spankings, not necessarily that the spanking were terrible, only that the amount of spankings inspires awe. Oh, the spankings were definitely painful, unpleasant, and inspired terror, but did they in fact transform little Dougie from a wicked, wicked boy, into a good man? Dada often quoted what he assumed to be a Bible verse: "Spare the rod and spoil the child." Meaning, if you don't beat your child, he will be rotten (apparently, beating a child gets the juices flowing so that the child does not begin to decompose and smell bad). But the verse is actually from a poem by Samuel Butler:
Love is a boy by poets styl'd;
Then spare the rod, and spoil the child.
Christians rarely take the 23rd Psalm seriously, wherein David declares: "Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me." Imagine a shepherd comforting a sheep by beating it with a rod.When we are the sheep, God comforts us, believe it or not, with His shepherd's rod. He protects us. Guides us.However, all that being as it may, Dougie got a lot of spankings. When he stuck his fingers in the fishpond (those goldfish seemed to be tempting Dougie to catch them, waving their golden tails at him)? Spanking. When he laughed too loud or knocked something over? Spanking. When he teased Donna or Pammy and Dada came up behind him? Spanking.Spanking. And spanking. And more spanking, spanking, spanking, spanking, spanking......and a spanking for good measure. Just in case.When he did something really, really terrible?No, not a spanking.Something worse.Terribly, terribly much worse.A "bare-bottom" spanking.Otherwise known as the I'm going to spank you on the bare butt! spanking. Dougie trembled at the thought of the infamous bare-butt spanking (thankfully, he did not receive too many of these, except of course, that even a few are far too many).Now even from his earliest times Dougie heard stories of how Grandma Larsen punished Dada when he was a little boy. His Mama used to make him go out in the back yard and "cut a switch," a long slender branch, which she beat with upon the back and bottom and the backs of the thighs, sometimes until he bled. So, in comparison, the kinds of spankings Dougie received were absolutely NOTHING in comparison. Why, for comparative purposes, it would be like saying that you by far would rather be run over by a Toyota Prius hybrid car, than a 20-ton dump truck. But then again, dead is still dead.The same principle applies with spankings, because Dada was a very big man, at 6'4" and over-200 pounds of him (and Dougie was always very, very small, until he turned about 15 years of age), and Dada was always very loud, except when he grew very, very angry. Then he went pale, and quiet, and that's when you knew a "bare-bottom" spanking was coming.Dada did not believe in using a weapon, as he considered what happened to him a form of torture, because you cannot tell how hard you are spanking a child if you are using a weapon, a club, a stick, a shepherd's rod or staff, or cattle prod, whale bopper, anything remotely dangerous like that.Dada employed his hand. And a hand is much less terrifying than bullwhip. But then again, Dada's hand was large, and hard, and strong, and he never spanked lightly. For a minor infraction, he would whack a child 10 times. For a more serious infraction, he would whack a child 20 times. For something serious, like breaking a window, that involved 20 whacks, but of the "bare-bottom" variety (meaning, no clothes to cushion the blows or shield the skin).Mama spanked sometimes too, but she was never in the same league with Dada. And it took quite a lot to provoke her into motherly corporal punishment. She felt she didn't have enough strength for the bottom-variety spankings, so she would paddle the arms. Slap and slap and slappity-slap. She held a child's hand in her own, and then slapped their arm, very fast, in a staccato fandango of slap-slap-slap-and-slappity-slap-slap-slap! Generally, she couldn't bear to slap more than half a dozen times.At first she had tentatively experimented with using a flyswatter, but felt again that in employing a weapon you just couldn't gauge the pain you were inflicting, or the potential damage.To her credit, Mama always seemed to feel worse than the object of her discipline. It was obvious she did not like to spank her children. Not so with Dada, as at least it always appeared there was a contented smile on his face after a spanking. In the end, Mama stopped spanking, and instead employed the dread words: "Wait till Dada comes home. I'm going to tell him to spank you."When Mama said those words, it seemed that organ music swelled up in the house, scary, swirling organ music. That somewhere the phantom was laughing, shrieking out laughter, as Mama uttered the dread words: "You just wait till Dada gets home!"And those, the put-off, prolonged, waiting spankings, were the very worst. Because for hours poor Dougie would worry, fretting, sweating, every time he began to have fun, he would remember, it was coming, the spanking, the terrible, terrible spanking. And Dada was absolutely never too tired to spank. If he were suffering from pneumonia, lying in bed at death's door, and Mama told him that Dougie required a spanking, Dada would spring from the bed, instantly healthy, ready and perfectly capable of doing God's work, spanking the children.Well, maybe not the children. Mostly Dougie.But did Dougie deserve the spankings. Probably. At least sometimes. To tell the truth, probably 1 out of 20 spankings probably were justified.But more importantly, did the spankings work? Or did they backfire? Now, obviously, they did not ruin Dougie. He is not scarred today, afraid to meet people eye to eye. He suffers no bursts of rage wherein he desires to spank people, or pick on people. He was never a bully (well, perhaps there were two instances in his life where he was a bully, and he's very, very sorry for those times, but that's a later story).But what happened, Dougie became so terrified of spankings that he always said the first thing that comes to a terrified child's lips: "I didn't do it!" Or when Dada demanded: "Did you do this?" Dougie would emphatically shake his head NO. Then he would be interrogated, sometimes for over an hour, always ending in the ultimate "bare-bottom" spanking.So the lesson for Dougie was this: "Own up to it NOW, like a man, and you get a spanking. If you deny it, then you will get a bare-bottom spanking. So it is best to admit it in the beginning."This never seems like a good deal to a child. In fact, when a child is terrified, he can't even reason beyond: "I don't want to be hit!"So Dougie became known as a LIAR. Sometimes he might wake from a bad dream to feel his forehead, as if it might have been branded there when he was five years old.Dougie often thought, even as a smallest boy, "What if God ever reached down and smacked people when they were bad?" There would certainly be a lot of terrified people, wouldn't there? There would definitely be a whole lot of smacking going on.But then again, and again, but then again, these are Dougie's memories, the neurons and dendrites inscribed deeply, deeply inside his brain. This is how he remembers it. Mama, now Grandma, does not remember it the same. She seems to remember that possibly Dougie was spanked once, maybe twice throughout his childhood. And big sister Donna, now a mother five times over with grown children, believes Dougie imagined everything.And Dougie does have that imagination thing, and always did, and Dougie does have that memory thing which enables him to remember almost as far back as his own birth, give or take a year or two. But the adult Dougie holds no anger towards his Dada, as Dada never abused Dougie, nor did Mama ever come close to such a thing. Dougie always knew that they were doing the best that they could, and that they always loved their children. If Dougie were to complain about anything, it would only be the quantity of the spankings, not the quality.A good thing is that the cycle of violence, which began probably with Grandma Larsen when she was a little girl (and it extended probably further and worse on up her family tree), weakened somewhat in Dada — for instance, he refused to employ a weapon, or strike his children with any form of cowardly club, machine gun, or bear trap. And the violence weakened further with Dougie, who became Papa, and spanked far, far less than Dada ever did. And those seldom times when the grown-up Dougie ever administered a spanking, it was always most certainly half as many as his own father employed, and never resulted to the tool of the "Bare-Bottom" spanking (although he has threatened to do so, probably more than a few times). One thing that always baffled Dada was the fact that Dougie never stayed mad at him. Dada would say: "Dougie never holds a grudge." Pammy and Donna would not even speak to him, Donna sometimes for days after receiving a spanking. But Dougie pretty much forgot about it and got on with his life, having fun, goofing off. Always so much goofing off, and yes, it was a goofy job, but somebody had to do it, and Dougie always did it with all his might.There were just too many adventures in the world, and hardly enough time to address even a few of them."That Dougie, he never holds a grudge."And then poor Dougie would knock something over.Uh-oh.All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
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