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One more story from Allen Street…
Yes, I could walk to school, what maybe ten minutes to school and fifteen returning home, but I seemed to have a problem. Let me frame this story. I don’t know how, but mom had made friends with a woman across the pedestrian island/park/median, whatever it was called. Perhaps during the day they had time to visit each other, chat and share stories, talk about kids and/or husbands. I do not know. And, somehow, I was aware there was a friendship which, for all I know, was a first. Certainly, there were none in Brooklyn.
So. More about me and my tragic tale. Every day! There was mud on my clothes and shoes when I got home. I do not know how the mud got on my shoes or pants, it just did. I concluded it happened while walking, with care, along a path. In the forest that separated the school and home. Mom had repeatedly warned me. Never again. I can only imagine what the consequences might be the next time I arrive home dirty. Would it be the wooden spoon?
Well, guess we’ll find out because the very next day as I exit the forest, I notice I have somehow gained mud, once again, on my pants. I panic.
What to do? Looking back, I’m pretty sure I was not an abused child but must admit I did not have a great relationship, as noted before, with the wooded spoon. And, as best as I can recall, my dad never spanked me. That was my mother’s purview. So, here I stood having broken another rule: problem solving.
I decided I would go to the house where my mom’s friend lived and ask her to wash and dry my muddy pants, and I did. Apparently, as I sat in my tighty-whities wrapped in a towel waiting. She thought it best to call my mom, so she would not worry, and share what I assume she, the gracious lady, thought was a funny story.
Mom did not worry, but she was waiting for my arrival. I might note mom was not pleased with my creativity. Beyond that, everything became a whirl, a memory hidden in time not to be revealed.
I recall her asking, “what were you thinking?”
Apparently, there was to be no correct response to her inquiry. Again.
Bird Walk. Sitting here just realized a fun fact. Now into my seventies, seventy-three to be exact, a week does not go by without Norma asking, “what’s that on your shirt?”
“I don’t know,” I mumble, looking for the spot.
“Make sure you pretreat that shirt.”
Anyway, no wooden spoon, a lecture, a new warning for another day. Less than twenty-four hours away.
Why would he go to such an extreme? Knock on a neighbor’s door seeking help, to wash and dry his pants? I’m not even sure how he knew which house to approach? Maybe he saw me waving across the way. Why so much fear? Really. I rarely needed to punish him. And even on those few occasions I pulled out the wooden spoon, a couple of swats on the back of his legs, and one would think I was beating him. When home spends his time in his room or outsides always within hearing distance, playing with the neighborhood kids or riding his bike around the median. There was a park at the end of the block, but he never ventured that far away.
Dick never punishes him, rarely converses with him. Return from work, bathe, we eat dinner and sit back and watch TV or relax on the front porch watching the sunset or occasionally stopping the Ice Cream truck (summer) for a treat. Wednesday and Sunday nights church service. A word or two here or there, but discipline, my job. You know what my parents taught me. Spare the rod and spoil the child. My dad set the rules, my mom the enforcer.
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