I got a spanking when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I wasn’t an angel, but as far as I know, it was the only one I had until I broke a window as a teenager.
It was late summer. Daddy was working the ground after harvesting and storing whole ear corn in the crib. Several loads had been sold, because late summer meant school starting and the kids – all six of us – would need new shoes and clothes.
A summer rain had turned the red clay to mud. My sister and I, breaking in our new shoes, decided to play in the field. In our new school shoes. As I remember mine were a dark brown Mary Jane style. This was back in the days when girls wore dresses to school, so the shoe style was sensible.
At any rate, for running around in the muddy field with new shoes, we both got our hinnies tanned. Smoked. With a belt. The shock of a spanking was far worse than the ouch.
But it occurred to me recently how much more the damaged shoes must have hurt my father.
Daddy was a milkman. He drove a milk truck that supplied schools with little cartons of milk and juice as well as the tiny ice cream containers complete with a wooden spoon. He also farmed and helped his brothers and father with their farms and dairies.
He worked himself to a frazzle keeping us all fed and the farm going. For us to ruin new shoes was the same as throwing money we couldn’t spare out the window.
There would have been no money to replace two pairs of shoes. He must have been out of his mind with worry.
What we didn’t know then was it was very late in Daddy’s life. He would pass away in December of the same year. His heart gave out, damaged by years of smoking and repeated bouts of pneumonia.
What I can remember of him was a good man who loved us enough to teach us to work hard and consequences for bad decisions.
In those days men didn’t express their feeling. Not in words, anyway. Husbands and fathers let families know they cared by getting up and going to work, keeping the rent paid and the kids fed. That was love, unspoken and unqualified.
Today that has been made fun of and marginalized. Like somehow it isn’t enough or it’s wrong somehow. Imagine how our nation could be transformed by men like that, men who are steadfast fathers and husbands, more interested in family than in Facebook, more interested in life than in television. A generation of men’s men.
It might take us back to a place of respect, dedication and personal accountability, a place where much of the country seems to want to go.
A place Daddy would recognize through the window of his milk truck.