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| Ammo for raising kids with some dang respect. |
My dad was more of a rage thrower than a rage hitter. Not a man to limit his options, he would still lash out with a 'pop on a noggin' should he get the feeling. Many times in the morning he would be on the phone conducting some business, blocking the only hallway in the house with his body. He would stand there in the exact center of the house and expect total quiet. He often had a plastic cup handy and when we would goof around and he would fire it off and try to hit one of us in the head with it. He did about half of the time. He followed that up with a stern face and some snapping.
My dad liked to use down-home colloquialisms to describe how hard he was going to hit us when he slapped us in the head. Southern classics like, 'I am going to thump your melon' and ' I am going to put a knot on your head so big Oral Roberts can't pray it off'. In case you are one of the few unfamiliar with the major evangelical preachers of the middle 20th century, Oral Roberts was an evangelist with healing powers that were quite good for praying off knots on people's heads but his skill was just less than my father's in administration of such head trauma.
You can take the boy out of the south. . .
He employed one other odd form of discipline. In our mobile home, a short wall separated the kitchen and front room with the sink on one side. If we were fighting in the living room, he would grab the sprayer from the sink and spray us and the carpet and the furniture down. That usually stopped us, but it did soak everything in the process.
