Chinese Grandmas Spring Into Action

As some of you know, I teach English language classes to Chinese kids at night. Lately, I've had a very full schedule. The coronavirus is sweeping through China and the schools are closed all over. The kids are restless because their parents are keeping them inside all day. I'm making more money than I did last year as more and more parents are putting their kids in online classes like mine. Some seem to be putting their kids in classes for punishment. Those are always fun classes. Anyway the group classes are particularly exciting and by the end of the night, I'm pretty well pooped out.

Working with the kids, I find they are pretty spooked. Because they can't leave the house, the schools are pretty much all shut down throughout February, and they have limited contact with their peers in real-time, the kids are very much aware that something bad is happening. I have to be careful not to encourage them to talk about it lest I fall afoul of Chinese authorities.

So how are two-income Chinese families taking care of the little ones while they are at work? Daycare's are terrifying and leaving them altogether with a friend exposes them to the same threats as they can't be sure someone entering the friend's home isn't infected.

Into the breach springs the Chinese grandmas. When you think of grandmas in America, you think of kindly white-haired ladies who spoil their grandkids shamelessly. But these ladies who have moved in with their children to care for the grandkids are by no means American grandmas. Based on what I get from the kids in bits and pieces, Chinese grandmas tend to be tough, no-nonsense taskmasters. Some of the kids are a bit afraid of them. I've also noticed that my late evening classes have stopped altogether. Apparently grandma makes the kids go to bed earlier than Mom and Dad did.

All that said, these stiff-spined seniors are doing their bit to prevent the spread of this hideous disease among Chinese kids. It's pretty scary out there and the kids know it. One of my 4 year olds told me yesterday, "All Chinese people sick!" when he was telling me how he had to stay inside the house all day. It's indicative of the seriousness of the outbreak that children who are being protected from the news by their parents, still have picked up on the seriousness of the epidemic. Stories coming out of Communist China tell of hundreds of bodies a day coming through hospital morgues - far more than the 500-800 deaths being reported by the Chinese politburo. One of my children told me the virus came from people eating bugs and bats and "bad things". Evidently the kids are being warned to be careful what they eat. That story has been poo-pooed by some leftist pundits lately, but apparently it's a rumor being spread across China enough that the kids have picked it up.

The fact that schools across China are closed all this month according to the kids, gives you an idea of how bad it is. Chinese schools don't do snow days or close for anything more than national holidays, and then rather reluctantly. You should see the homework these guys take home on holidays!

Whether the disease breaks loose or not, especially among the youth of China, might just depend on this army of tough women and their tenacity in keeping their descendants safely corralled until the emergency is over.

God bless those brave Chinese grandmas!

© 2019 by Tom King

The Best Medicine for ADHD Ever....

Teachers these days really struggle with ADHD kids. They don't sit still, they're easily distracted they don't obey orders and they have far too much energy. Little wonder teachers want to drug them. Some say ADHD is an imaginary mental disorder. Some say, "These kids just need a belt applied to their hindquarters."

As an ADHD kid myself, I can tell you what these kids need and that ain't it. What they need is time. Modern educators and parents have convinced themselves that because kids can learn things at an incredibly young age that they ought to learn school stuff when they are very young. I wonder why no one seems to have wondered whether all that early learning capacity wasn't designed for something else besides learning numbers, shapes, ABC's and quotations from Voltaire.

Kids have to learn an incredible lot of stuff in an incredibly short period of time. They start out totally self-centered eating machines, unable to walk, talk, do higher math or diagram sentences. So, of course they have to have the ability to learn quickly. Children pick up languages at an incredible rate for instance and they need all their available brain power to do so. 

I think God knew what he was doing with kids, giving them the capacity to learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it. I don't believe he intended for us to train our children to be factory workers and yet that is precisely what the German Kindergarten graded school system is designed to do. Kindergartens were designed to teach young German students to show up on time, sit in one place all day, shut up, do repetitive work, and not question authority. There's a reason for that. Do you remember what Germany was trying to prepare for in the late 19th/early 20th century.
 
At any rate, I think it's a bad system, especially for American kids. In the United States, the ADHD gene, whatever that is, is present in a larger percentage in the United States than any other country in the world. That's because ADHD adults couldn't get along in places like Germany - they were too restless and came to America to get away from all that.* So with a huge number of our progeny having the restless, high energy genetic makeup. What do we do? 

Some children (actually all children, I believe) should not be forced to show up for school on time, to sit in chairs all day, to do repetitive work and not speak or question authority. Now I suppose it would be a useful system if you were training our kids to be worker drones in a war materials factory as the Germans were when they created the educational system the United States adopted whole hog at the beginning of the 20th century. It was a mistake. Americans aren't wired that way. Look how fast we shoved manufacturing jobs like that over to China, Mexico and India. Americans don't like those jobs and I don't blame factory jobs when I was working my way through school. I've done them and hated every minute. They're mind numbing and soul-destroying jobs.

Some children, the ones that are considered ADHD because they can't sit still in class, should not go to school until they are at least 10 years old, maybe even 12. If you let them outside to run and play and exercise the full scope of their imaginations, to learn social skills, to learn language and to reach a point where they are ready to learn, they will catch up and blow past the kids that started school 3 to 5 years earlier. The dirty little secret with the way the school system is setu up is that for the first 5 or 6 years, teachers spend a good deal of their time reteaching things the kids learned last year and forgot over summer vacation. A kid who has been under parental care and who has learned from nature, from play and from taking responsibilities at home, is far more ready to learn than a child who has been pushed along on the edge of his or her abilities and forced to learn things he or she has no interest in and was not ready to learn.

 

About the time the hormones begin to kick in, a child is ready to learn career skills in earnest. I think we ought to test them abour then to determine what sort of things they are interested in and should begin immediately learing career skills right alongside reading, writing, arithmetic, history and the arts. Children would learn faster because, if they've had decent parents, they would have developed more mature social skills and an interest in learning. 

We should allow them to learn at their own pace in subjects like reading and mathematics and grammar. I believe you'd find that kids would roar through these subjects if allowed to work at their own speed. Subjects like history, science, literature and art should be long leisurely classes facilitated by historians, writers, scientists and artists. Businessmen should teach accounting and practical math skills. Retirees with actual experience doing things would make wonderful teachers and would do it if asked. 

Physical education should go back to activities and games that are played for a purpose to teach teamwork, strategy and fair play and to build physical strength, flexibility, grace and stamina. Basic vocational skills should be taught early. Schools should set up cottage industries where the kids could build things and do things and to buy and sell goods and services on the open market (teach 'em to use eBay, Etsy, Amazon and other online resources to market their goods). No child should finish high school without a marketable skill. No child should be allowed to drop out until he has completed at least one skill certification that can get him a job. Physical education and so-called vocational education should work together. Take the kids into the forest and show them how to clear brush, handle tools and to work safely.

Do that and kids like the one up the tree above will learn faster, more thoroughly and to a better purpose. Not every kid needs to be trained for college. They need to be trained to work, to live healthfully, to manage their money and to participate as adults in the world to come. It should begin in earnest in 5th grade (about the time you learn fractions). Do that - create these kinds of purposeful classrooms and ADHD kids will not be bored. Make math, science, English and other languages like video games with instant feedback for doing well and these kids will suck up information like sponges.

We need to give up the idea of rigid classrooms with everybody sitting in rows, all doing the same work at the same time mostly for the convenience of the teacher. We need to hire skilled teachers and pay them better. They can handle more kids at once than the ordinary garden-variety teacher's college graduates they're turning out these days. They would be more interesting than ordinary teachers. From age 10 on, I think kids should have different teachers for different subjects - each teacher having expertise in their fields. Kids should learn to speak and write by speaking and writing. Instead of writing lines, they should be editing stories and writing, composing and printing their own newspapers. Talented kids should learn to work as a team as writers, editors, marketers, graphic designers and produce their own books and magazines. They should learn by doing real things as soon as they possibly can.

We should teach by simulating interest; by doing and acting. Sports should be about fitness, cooperation, sportsmanship and grace under pressure, not about building some coaches win/loss record. We need to stop firing coaches just because their kids don't win games. We should fire coaches who are abusive, who risk the health and safety of our kids for their own reputations and who care more about winning than building character.

ADHD kids are particularly well suited to high-energy careers. Why aren't we training them early to be cops, soldiers, firemen, athletes, forest rangers, pilots, entertainers and such. Why do we waste our time trying to make accountants and pharmacists out of kids that haven't a prayer of making a go of such careers.  ADHD kids make great entrepreneurs too, they just have to hire good accountants and CFOs to handle the paperwork. 

The point is that, if you stop trying to shove kids that are basically round, oval, oblong, rectangular, triangular and free form pegs into the square hole that is our education system, ADHD will virtually disappear in our schools. And those kids problem kids?  They'll simply be your high-energy, highly successful kids and the stars of your schools.

Just sayin'

Tom King
© 2015

* It's no accident that more research is being done on ADHD in Germany than anywhere else in the world. Germany's rigid Prussian culture offers little scope for the ADHD imagination and kids with ADHD are seen in Deutschland as a particular problem that must somehow be eliminated.

The Booby Traps in Your I-Pod

Micah's graduation picture - in full kilt!

Within the modern day mp3 archives that we music lovers collect on our I-Pods (or in my case on my cell phone's mp3 music player) there lie little booby traps.  Thanks to Amazon.com we can now buy songs individually for 50 cents to a dollar instead of having to buy a whole album just to get two or three "good ones".  In this way, over time, we amass vast collections of incredibly eclectic music. This always amazes me a little, given that it didn't cost any more to put that big a music collection together 40 years later than it did to collect 45 rpm single records back when I was a high school kid. Not only that, but you don't even have the cost of a trip to the record store to factor in.

You can even collect free music from indie musicians you happen to like but the big record moguls don't particularly care for. As a result, I have banjo versions of Bear Necessities and All of Me, alongside several Doris Day hits, the theme to Dark Star (an obscure 1960s era sci-fi film and all my favorite hits by the Monkees and the Beatles; not to mention a miraculous duet with Placido Domingo and John Denver. I even scooped up an all-acoustic version of the Beatles playing Norwegian Wood. How cool is that?

Today's increasingly off-the-books music distribution system must make record company moguls frantic as they lose more and more control over whether or not an artist's music actually finds its way out to the public. You see, these days, the public listens to what it wants rather than waiting for record companies to tell us what we want to hear. No record company, for instance, would sell me a banjo version of Those Were the Days, the theme song to the TV show "All in the Family". Songs that are "golden oldies" need no longer wait for some "Greatest Hits" collection ot come out in order to get our hands on our favorite music. We can go online, buy and download the songs we like instantly. And I can even throw in a recording of a kid I used to teach in Sabbath School singing Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone at church or another one of my son and daughter with some friends singing a song called Miracle that my late son wrote with his brother. That one always makes me cry, but in a good way.

That's what I mean about booby traps. We often salt our music collections with songs that mean something to us - everything from "our song", a relic of our courting days, to one of our kids' favorite songs. One of those got me this morning. In 2006 we lost our middle son, Micah, a big bear of a young man who, at 28, stood 6'4" and was close to 300 pounds. When he was in high school, he wasn't exactly tiny - a big ebullient larger-than-life personality and a fun guy. He was incredibly shy, but covered it by being class clown and something of a show-off.

My mp3 player a few minutes ago rolled out M.C. Hammer's "Can't Touch This", one of Micah's favorite songs. You haven't seen anything till you've seen a kid Micah's size doing Hammer's moves to this song. And the boy had some amazing moves for someone his bulk. He played on his school's basketball team and had some muscles on him that used to fool opponents. These wiry little guys would rush him when he was defending the key, figuring they could topple him pretty easily. More than one wound up sitting on his butt on the boards, having struck what felt like a brick wall. They used to cry to the referees for a foul call. I remember one ref standing over one such prostrate whiner, "Hey dude, you're the one who decide to run into him." He pointed at Micah, "You need a little physics refresher there, son."

Micah also did a creditable "Electric Slide". These tiny little girls would drag him out on the floor at parties and get him to lead the "Electric Slide". It used to make him happy. He was pretty good at it too.

Micah had a lot of sadness in his short life. I think about those young women and the way they pulled him into the center of the action and encouraged him. They gave him confidence and, in a way, the courage, at the end of his life, to recommit himself to Christ. I am so grateful to Micah's friends for their love and acceptance of my son. A lot of big kids don't get that. He did. It's like you all knew somehow, how much he needed your support and love.

Micah (right) leading the girls' basketball team fight song from the stands!

That's why I was standing in my kitchen this morning listening to Hammer going, "Can't Touch This!" and crying like a big, hairy, white-headed 61 year-old baby. Some people avoid songs that do that to them, even though we inevitably salt our music collections with songs just like that. I don't avoid the emotion when that happens. I let the song run all the way through. Sometimes I turn it up and go ahead and weep without restraint. Sometimes you need that.

It kind of flushes you out emotionally. We miss our lost loved ones. It's good that we do. I don't want to forget a single thing about my son. To me it's evidence that we weren't designed to lose people we love. We were designed to live forever; to always be able to turn around and find those beloved people right there, ready to make another day special and joyous.

I'm ready to see this mess of a world come to an end and to start up a new one. Maybe God will let me plant trees for the new Earth. I always wanted to design a forest. Maybe the kids and I can do it together. Mom can supervise. I'll bring the tunes...

Tom King
(c) 2015

Over the Garden Wall - My Debut Role as a Troll

Keene Public School's 1964 Production of "Over the Garden Wall"

It was 1964 and I was about to make my first appearance as an actor in a musical. The 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grades were staging Keene Public School's musical production of "Over the Garden Wall", a play based loosely on Mother Goose stories and rhymes.

This picture takes me back. I can't identify everybody, but I do know a few of them.

The farmer types on the far left are Barney McClure (my cousin) and Elaine Ferguson as "Jack and Jill". Famous future Dentist, John Barroso is sitting on a ladder behind them starring as "The Sun". The first butterfly on the left is Amma Sue Johnson. Behind her to the right are the Washington brothers, Manuel and Phillip. Continuing right are Patsy Marshall and Wanda Davis (the first girl I ever had a date - it was a disaster, don't ask). The bluebird was, I think, David Carver. And last but not least in this rogues gallery is the white-beared dude dressed all in black - Tom King my own self, as Mother Goose's hit troll. My character abruptly enters stage right and threatens to abduct Jack and Jill and take them to a dark cave. I think they needed to end the play and couldn't figure out how since it didn't have much in the way of a plot. So the writer apparently decide, "I know. Let's send in a troll!"

And to make matters even more weird, I was a singing troll. I sang my threats to the children - ominously, as I had been told by Mrs. Webb, the fifth and sixth grade teacher and director of the play.

You'd never get a character like that troll in a children's play these days. Too creepy! I was like this really short pervert troll enforcer for Mother Goose. What's weirder, if you can believe it is that I can still sing the stupid song to this day.

I missed most of the play myself because I was hiding backstage in utter terror and praying to God for strength to go out there and sing in front of all those people (I was in 3rd grade and terribly shy). 
But I did it:

Naughty, naughty children
Go home and go do bed,
Or I will quickly take you
To caverns dark and dread.
Mother Goose is looking
For you every where.
So beware..............BEEEEEEEWAAAAAAAAAAARE!

See, I told you I still remembered the stupid song. I ought to. I sat in an oak tree for two days memorizing that song because I was so scared I'd forget the lines. I could do it better now, because I have a deeper voice. Sounded more like a Munchkin than a dangerous troll back in 3rd grade.

Later when I became a teacher, I remembered that moment of stage fright when doing school productions with my own students and tried to remember how traumatizing that first acting job was.

Two years later I played Pinocchio in our 6th grade play. Star of the show I was, what with being Mrs. Webb's favorite actor and all. It gave me a big head. Seriously, I have a head the size of a watermelon.

One of the miscellaneous children in the Pinocchio play was my childhood neighbor, Steve Wilhite, who had one big line - something about "Look there's a star!" He was supposed to point toward the back of the room as he said it. Steve argued with Mrs. Webb that we should hang a star back there because everyone would turn around and look for one.

She apparently didn't have a lot of faith in Steve's acting ability and told him dismissively, "No one's going to turn around and look for a star."

Steve's judgment was later vindicated during the actual production when he delivered his big line, pointed and EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE AUDIENCE TURNED AROUND TO LOOK FOR THE STAR (including Mrs. Webb and Mr. Pauly, the principal, who later was overheard to say, "They should have put a star back there on the wall or something.")! I don't know about Steve, but I'd have felt pretty good about my acting skills right at that moment.

Later I went on to play Merlin in a community theater production of Camelot and nearly got blown up by a special effect. I said an unfortunate word, which the microphone I was wearing picked up and delivered clearly to the audience. That word was NOT in the original Lehrner and Lowe script. The Cleburne Times Review entertainment writer who was there that night was overheard to say, "Was that in the script?"

It is the moment my wife likes to remind me of whenever I get the acting bug and start talking about doing community theater again.

Ah, well. At my age, one must be content with past glories.


© 2014 by Tom King

Thieves In the Garden



The boys playing on the "trolley"  at Honeymom's and Grandpa's

When my boys were little, my wife taught them to love raw veggies.  She'd set broccoli, peas and cauliflower on their high chair tray and pour a little puddle of ranch dressing beside them. They were at that fiercely independent stage where they didn't want to be fed anymore. They wanted to do it themselves.

My wife, a scathingly brilliant educator where it came to getting children to do what she wanted, came up with this little ruse to get our kids to eat things they would normally have resisted. People at restaurants would marvel that we could get two and three year olds to eat raw veggies.

Honeymama, who recieved her nickname from her grandkids, planted a garden every year. My grandpa plowed up the ground, dug the rows and together they planted vegetables every year. They started in January with the English peas - two or three rows of them.   My grandmother for the longest time thought she had racooons because she kept finding all these empty pea pods when she went to pick peas.

It wasn't coons.



My Grandmother

Whenever we came out to visit, the boys always loved ot go out and play in the backyard. My grandpa had built a swing and a zip line trolley made from a pulley and a steel cable strung from the top of an oak tree to the bottom of another one. They also liked to poke around the barn and climb on the cow pen fences.  Turns out they were also sneaking out into the garden.

They would sit between the rows of English peas where we couldn't see them and strip young sweet peas right out of the pods. Inevitably, they got so busy snitching peas, they didn't hear my grandmother come out the back door.

She saw what was happening and slipped back in the house, calling us to the window.  There, out in the garden, were our offspring crawling around amongst the peas, their heads bobbing up and down like a pair of cows grazing in a pasture. I was all set to rush out there and punish them, but Honeymama told me to leave them alone. She kind of got a kick out of them sneaking around eating raw peas, I think, even if it did reduce the size of her pea harvest..

Her solution?  Every season after that she just planted an extra row of peas for the boys.

There's a lot of Godly wisdom in that somehow..

Tom King - (c) 2012

Reaching

(c) 2010 by Tom King

Reach for the sky

When the moment rambles by.

Wrap your fingers 'round a cloud
And squeeze it till the rain comes out.

Dance upon the water,
Grinning till your face hurts.
Fling some sand.
Kick a wave.

When we get old
We start to forget.
What it means
To dance on the beach

What did it mean
To wring life that way
From a handful of sky
And a forkful of sand?

I wish that I
Could remember
How to reach that high
And laugh that loud.

Perhaps if I actually
Went to the beach sometime....
.

Cousin' Alonso and Old Bob the Exploding Dog

My grandpa used to tell this story to us when we were kids. He grew up in Keene, Texas, a small college town populated exclusively by Seventh-day Adventists. Most fundamentalist religious communities have strict expectations that local children will exhibit proper deportment and Keene was no exception. Good behavior is especially expected of any child whose grandpa was one of the founders of the local church and a full time minister.

My grandfather's Cousin Alonso was a notable rapscallion. Grandpa Adolph, a shy boy and the only child of the local school teacher, always held a sneaking admiration for Alonso's audacity in the face of remorseless authority.  For all that Grandpa H.B. French might have been in the way of a paragon of virtue, nine year-old Alonso was determined to be his own man.

Old H.B. was a noted prayer warrior and often prayed aloud and with feeling up in the barn loft on top of any convenient hay pile.  One day Alonso heard him praying about the end of the world and the second coming. When the old man got to the part about the fires of hell, Alsono set fire to the haypile. He was Keene, Texas' original special effects man.  One stunt, however, nearly ended his career.

Alonso and my Grandpa, Adolph, decided to go fishing. Alonso's dad had been blasting stumps in his cotton field the previous week and Alonso was suddenly struck by one of those brilliant ideas that come to all such great minds when facts and necessity come together in a moment of inspiration.

1. Alonso wanted to catch lots of fish.
2. There were lots of fish in the pond.
3. Catching fish with worms and a cane pole is an inefficient way to catch lots of fish.
4. Alonso had heard that dynamite, set off underwater brings fish to the surface where you can scoop them up with a net.
5. There were quarter sticks of leftover dynamite in Dad's shed.
6. Alonso knew where the key was.
          and finally.....
7.  Dad and mom had gone to town for supplies.

In that sudden moment of over-whelming Socratic logic, all the elements of a successful fishing trip came together in a flash of juvenile (delinquent) insight.

Alonso, snagged a quarter stick of TNT, a fuse and some matches and headed for the pond with his posse, four or five local urchins, in tow.  Grandpa and Old Bob, his faithful dog trotted along happily at Alonso's side.

It should be noted here that "Old Bob" was a girl dog. Grandpa was about 6 at the time and, the school board in those ancient times, had not yet instituted kindergarten sex education classes in the public school. Grandpa was, therefore, blissfully ignorant of how the whole dog gender thing actually worked. Old Bob later became a mom and Grandpa got several excellent retrievers out of her litters including the semi-legendary Dixie.  But none was a better natural retriever than Old Bob.

You probably see where this is going, if the picture at the top of the page didn't give it away.

Down at the pond, Alonso prepared to launch his improvised explosive fishing device. He scratched a match to flame, touched the fuse and flung the sputtering stick of dynamite into the pond. He plugged his ears and turned away.

Even with his ears plugged, he could not fail to hear an unmistakable second splash that followed on the heels of the first splash made by the dynamite.

When everyone looked up, Old Bob was already swimming toward shore with the dynamite hissing and sputtering in her teeth.  First she tried to give it back to Alonso, who shrieked like a girl and fled for his life up the nearest tree. Next she ran amongst the posse that had been lying just over the top of the dam waiting to observe their first underwater explosion. The posse, collectively uninterested in owning a genuine lighted stick of TNT, promptly scattered in all directions. Finally, Old Bob chased grandpa around the pond a few times and finally convinced him to take the dynamite from her.

Young Adolph snatched the stick of TNT and flung it toward the middle of the pond. He barely had the presence of mind to fall on Old Bob who was preparing to fling herself into the pond again in hot pursuit. The dynamite exploded about 6 inches above the water sending a loud report echoing off the steeple of the church and the high walls of Old North Hall clear up on the college campus.  It being a sleepy Sunday afternoon, the explosion attracted all sorts of unwanted attention.

The boys scattered into the woods, but troops of alarmed parents soon had them all rounded up. In a trice, the town moms sorted out the guilty from the merely stupid and delivered them that deserved it, to their dads for a little 1920's rough justice.

Old Bob, confused by the ferocity of the blast, was always a bit skittish about the retrieving business after that. She took to sniffing dead ducks and tree limbs alike before agreeing to fetch 'em.  She never again appreciated the smell of gunpowder and used to cock her head over ducks and quail that had been freshly shot, listening, I suppose, for any telltale hissing and popping sounds.

Wouldn't child protective services have fun with an incident like that these days?

I'm just sayin'

Tom King - Flint, TX

(c) 2010 by Tom King

Honeymama, Dr. Pepper & Behavioral Science

My grandmother was a formidable woman. We cousins called her 'Honeymama' - a blending of my grandfather's name for her (Honey) and the name all our Moms called her (Mama). She was of Scots-Irish-Native American descent. I also married a woman of Scots-Irish-Native American descent too. Like my Grandpa King, I learned early on that you don't want to mess with a Scots-Irish-Indian woman. I'm just sayin'. They will strap on a kilt, pick up a shillelagh and go on a warpath on your fuzzy hindquarters.

Mabel McClure grew up in a family of 12, the oldest daughter and, of course, the one her parents most depended on as backup substitute parent. She babysat the little ones, helped with the laundry and on Saturday afternoon when the boys went off to town to the movies to watch Lash Larue and Tom Mix, she stayed home with Nanny and cleaned house. She never quite forgave her siblings for that bit of parental injustice, but she did pay them back.

As was common in those days, all the kids worked in the cotton fields from a very early age. Paw-Paw used to give them all a bag and line them up each at the head of a row. Then he announced that anyone who got to the end of their row slower than Mabel (my grandmother) would get a whipping. Paw-Paw was a tough customer; so much so that when Grandpa and Honeymama decided to get married, they had to sneak off to do it. Grandpa picked her up in his Dad's T-model for a date one Saturday night. They drove down to Itasca, Texas and found a preacher there to marry them. Rather than tell Paw Paw, my grandpa brought Mabel home that night. Everybody had told young Mr. King that Paw-Paw would fight. Rather than duke it out with his new father-in-law, they didn't tell Nanny and Paw-Paw about their marriage for two more weeks. When my Grandpa did finally fess up, he did so fully expecting to get pounded, even though Grandpa was a big strapping boy, a boxer and tough as nails. Paw Paw was about 130 pounds sopping wet, but he had a reputation as a tough and dangerous customer.

So, back in the cotton field, Honeymom knew he meant it when he threatened to whip anyone who didn't pick cotton as fast as she did. Now you'd think she'd have given her brothers and sisters a break - at least the youngest ones anyway. But, you'd be wrong. Instead, my grandmother would set a blistering pace, shoving cotton into her bag at alarming speed. And Paw Paw was true to his word according to the stories and more than one got their butts warmed for not keeping pace with their sister (my grandmother).

Then, on Saturday, Paw-Paw would load the boys all up and leave Honeymama and Nanny behind to give the house a thorough cleaning. It was unjust, no doubt about it, but he always did take her for granted. She really hated being left behind, though. I think it ruined the movies for her. She never went to the movie theater again for the rest of her life, except once in 1980 when "Coal Miner's Daughter", the story of Loretta Lynn came out. She made an exception for Loretta.

She didn't have much of a sense of humor that I remember. My Aunt once took her to see Jerry Clower in a futile attempt to get a chuckle out of her. She dismissed the witty Mr. Clower as "silly" and told Aunt Sandra she was glad she hadn't spent her own money on the tickets. She laughed at ordinary things, though and for some reason (probably something to do with cotton picking and the movies) she did seem to get a kick out of unhappy children throwing tantrums. Don't get me wrong, she wasn't a monster or anything. She'd laugh at family jokes and enjoyed get-togethers. There was nothing she liked better than having her kids and grandkids about her and she was a genius in the kitchen. We all lived for Thanksgiving and Christmas and 4th of July and Easter - those were the big ones, but any time you could get an invitation to Sabbath Dinner, you took it. She made whole wheat dinner rolls that didn't need butter, they were that good!

But I have this picture of my son, Micah throwing a little tantrum and Honeymama is standing behind him grinning from ear to ear with this impish, almost wicked little twinkle in her eye.

As long as I could remember, she always kept a wooden case with bottles of Dr. Pepper in it down in the basement. When we went to visit, we would sometimes get a bottle to drink, but not always. It was textbook behavioral conditioning. We were always well-behaved at Grandpa and Honeymama's on the chance we might get a bottle of Dr. Pepper from down in the cool dark basement. Studies have demonstrated that the most effective way to get behavior to repeat whether it's pet dogs or small children is not to hand out the rewards every time the subject performs the desired behavior. Instead reward the behavior intermittently so they never know for sure the reward will be coming. Honeymom wasn't a trained psychologist, so she did have some tells that gave away when you'd get sent down to the basement if you watched for them. It took me a while to figure out what triggered the invitation to run down to the basement and get myself a Dr. Pepper. I got pretty good at fishing for Dr. Peppers.

We were never allowed to ask for one, though so you had to be kind of sneaky about the fishing. Mom was very strict about that. We were pretty sure asking for one would not work. You apparently had to deserve one. Except nobody ever told us exactly what we had to do to deserve one. I figured out after a while that not running or being noisy in the house was one of the criteria. Letting the grownups talk was another one.

Sometimes we would go outside to avoid screwing up our chances, timing the end of our play so we were sitting in the den looking overheated and wearing our best innocent faces just before it was time to leave. Sometimes we'd sit on Grandpa's lap and listen to him tell stories and play his harmonica while the womenfolk talked in the kitchen. We had to be careful about giggling and laughing too much or we'd get grandpa in trouble right along with us.

Sometimes Honeymom would hint that the garden needed weeding and if Grandpa was out there working in the garden, we'd go out and give him a hand. We were lousy at weeding, but if we didn't do too much damage, we could usually count on a Dr. Pepper being offered. Of course, working the rows in the garden in the blistering Texas summer heat, you pretty soon began to wonder if it was worth a Dr. Pepper to put yourself through that misery. By then, however, you were afraid to quit weeding without being bidden to because since you'd invested that much sweat and sore muscles into it, you didn't want to lose what reward there was likely to be. So, you'd toil on in the sun.

The only ones of us who ever figured out how to get out of weeding were my own two boys Matt and Micah. They were 4 and 2 respectively and cute as buttons. One day, deciding they were old enough, Honeymom sent them out to "help" Grandpa in the garden. When my grandmother went out to check on them they were each halfway down a row of English peas. The vines were stripped of peas, but there weren't any peas in the buckets. The boys had been eating the raw peas as fast as they could pick them. They loved raw peas right off the vine. Honeymom sent them both inside for a Dr. Pepper so Grandpa and I could salvage at least some of the peas for cooking. My grandmother had that twinkle in her eye then too. I think she liked mischievious kids. To this day, I think I went about mooching Dr. Peppers all wrong the wrong way with her.

Her favorite child was my Dad and that man was a complete rascal. Of all his siblings, he was the one most like Honeymama's brothers and sisters. He could get away with almost anything with her. She used to send Dad to the orchard to cut a switch whenever his behavior became too outrageous. Dad's youthful career as delinquent resulted in the killing off an entire peach orchard as Honeymom wore out switches on his butt. But she still doted over him his whole life. I do believe she'd have sent him off to the movies while she did housework if he'd wanted to go.

I, unlike dear old Dad, grew up to be an upright citizen. Most kids have a period in their lives where they go over fool's hill and get in trouble or raise a little hell. I never did. I was a good boy.

I think it was the Dr. Peppers. I never figured out how to get around being "good" to earn one. So, I never quit trying. It was kind of pitiful really. My wife had the same thing with her Mamaw only it was Coca-Cola and Sheila did housework when she stayed summers with her grandmother.

In the last few years, my wife has started keeping Dr. Peppers and Cokes in those small glass bottles in the closet. Whenever I've been working around the house especially hard, she chills a couple of bottles and then brings them out of the fridge when we're done. We pop the tops together. It's a lovely sound, that bottle cap coming off with a hiss.

She gets a Coke in the small bottle. I get a Dr. Pepper made with cane sugar and bottled in Dublin, Texas as God intended.

And we sit in our chairs under the fan or out on the porch and we drink our drinks slowly, savoring the familiar taste - a good little boy and a good little girl, rewarding themselves for a job well done as though my Honeymama and her Mamaw were still watching us to make sure we behave ourselves.

© 2009 by Tom King

Day Care Blues

Trout Fishing in America is one of my favorite groups. As a survivor of more than a decade in day care and child care, I really get this song....
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The Punisher Cometh...

Boy howdy did we get a little peak inside Obama's head this past weekend. In a memorable shoving of the foot in the mouth, the Senator from Illinois said that if his girls ever made a mistake he wouldn't want to "punish" them with a baby.

Predictably the pro-life folks are way up in arms at the idea of a baby being punishment. While the whole tenor of Obama's comment makes me a little crazy too, pro-lifer's have a wee bit of a problem getting irate about the baby as punishment idea. After all, it comes straight out of the Bible.

When Adam and Eve bit the big one, God tossed them out of Paradise and commanded, "Go forth, be fruitful and multiply!" He was mad at them when he said it. I can hear God mumbling under His breath, "See how you like it when those little rug rats grow up and break YOUR heart!"

Children are the instructors God has presented us with to teach us how to be like Him. You want to learn how to be unselfish? Have a kid! You want to learn about self-sacrifice? Have a kid! You want to know how to give though it's breaking your hear? Walk your baby girl up the aisle with a little Mozart playing in the background. Want your faith to be tested to its limits? Watch one of your children suffer an illness or lose them to death.

Are kids a punishment? You could say that, but I think they're more of a teaching tool. It's how God molds our character. He gives us the most precious gift in the world when he gives us a child and he shows us how to love without limit, to give without asking the cost and to be willing to lay down your life for another person without even thinking about it.

My wife and I have been grieving for more than two years for our precious son. We understand how hard it must have been for God to watch his own son die.

Obama is looking at it all wrong. Kids are not a punishment. They are a gift. It's nice that the senator wants to teach his girls morals and values but without consequences for your actions, morals and values aren't worth much. Like faith without works, a vague sense that someone somewhere ought to be chaste and faithful and unselfish and honest is dead if there are no consequences that tie my behavior to those values. Having kids as a result of participating in an act of intimacy teaches you that love is something serious and important, not something you do just because you're bored some weekend and had too much tequila.

Just one man's opinion...

Tom King