This is the follow up to the last blog about varieties of familial forms of punishment is the story from a friend of what his dad did to him when he was obstreporous. Setting the scene: this was back in the fifties, in the era long before there were security lights all over the planet, creating light pollution so badly no one on this side of the Missisippi River knows what the night time sky looks like (outside of the programs at the local planetarium.) So, when it got dark, it got Really Dark at night, like the inside of the closet, except for starlight. Unless the moon was reflecting light to make things visible after the sun went down. And they lived 'way out in the country, miles from any possibility of paved thoroughfares and street lights.
His dad would take his very sharp folding pocket knife out of his pocket, and give it to this little kid, and say 'go out and cut a switch': After the sun went down. They lived in one of those old houses that you might still, rarely see out in the country that was built up on brick piers, several feet off the ground, to provide ventilation under the building. To get in, you had to climb a number of steps, and you can imagine what sort of things would be lurking under the steps to grab your ankles when you went out in the dark. Then there are all the other creeping things squatting just under the edge of the house, eyes glittering, mouth full of sharp teeth, dripping with saliva, in anticipation of a small child for a snack.
This kid is terrified of the dark - and all the things that it might hold that would love to gobble him up. But he has to go out in the yard and cut a switch to bring back to his dad. When he gets back in the house, amazed to have survived, back in the land of the living, he gives his dad the branch his trembling hands cut from the nearest shrub. His dad does not whale away with the branch, but just props it up in the corner of the room, with a warning. Giving him the stink-eye, while telling him if he chooses not to shape up, there will be consequences. Poor little guy never even has the switch applied to his backside- just the traumatic process of going out there in the dark is sufficient punishment to get him to completely overhaul his behavior.
And all those things he imagined would pounce on him, creeping around under the steps and dark shadowed recesses of the house - simply vanish with the first rays of light in the morning... to skulk back into place, waiting for a tasty tidbit to tremblingly trip down the back steps again for their voracious appetites.
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