Discipline

I came from a fairly disciplined place in the early sixties to another place that has become increasingly less hostile, less rigid.  But even back then discipline always fought hand-to-hand with leniency. 

In many ways, it was a simpler time when my parents always believed the nun's word over mine and we were actually encouraged to hang out with priests.  Platonically of course, but still unsettling when I think back on it.  There was the nuns and priests club, and then there was our club, and sometimes lay persons like us were allowed to enter for brief visits into their club. 

Things were not always black and white, of course, and when it came to discipline the lines really became blurred.  It was a mixture of the yin and the yang.

The nuns in my Catholic school were the sheriffs of my neighborhood.  They were the ATF agents, the mafia goons, the swat team swatting with all their might.  The year long,  we suffered many slings and arrows, some shaped like crosses.  The yard stick was the weapon of choice for the Darth Vader lookalikes, just as the wooden serving spoon was the weapon of choice at home.  The only thing that would garner you a little praise at school was a win at one of the frequent spelling bees. I have to admit, I was a champ at these contests.  After the glow of each victory wore off though, the nun would go back to calling me slow as molasses in January.

We all waited throughout the school year for the annual school picnic at Bushkill amusement park where nuns let their hair down, what little there was of it, to ride the bumper cars.  It was here that my passive aggressiveness turned active as I rammed nun-filled cars with abandon.  It was a death race, without the death part, the smell of revenge mixing deliciously with the aroma of cotton candy.  Occasionally, we'd see a nun off in the corner with a parent, talking business, but generally they seemed to be enjoying themselves. 

I had trouble reconciling the two phases of nun-hood, one a disciplinarian, the other a person just like us, caring, personable, even fun-loving... kind of.  One dark, the other light.  Admittedly, it's this dichotomy I now try to embody as a parent to varing degrees of success and failure. 

Take my dad, for instance.  He was a bundle of nerves, I could tell, but he kept it well hidden, in reserve for sporadic outbursts.  These were explosive moments that seemed to last forever and were none too fun to be a part of, I can assure you.  But looking back, I'm guessing this was his own way of dealing with that same duality:  good cop, bad cop in one neat little package.

Yes, there was responsibility, but we were left alone to our own devices quite often.  We were allowed to go out for the day and not check in till supper time, taking long walks to the next town, stopping at the pharmacy there to drink the free quinine water. We dawdled about the old factory ruins on the bank of the river.  We hung out at the river, which had already swallowed up a few locals.  And we walked the train trestle by the canal.  All in a day's work, you might say, with no helicoptering parents, at least until we got home and had to answer a few pointed questions.

My feeling was that Rita Millheim had to answer for a lot, even though I didn't hear the expected cries of terror from her house as she tried to atone for her one big mistake.  Actually, in retrospect,  I'm sure she was treated quite fairly by her parents.  But this is how it went down:

Johnny Shugart and I were sitting on the curb next to the fire hydrant in front of Whitey Sodl's corner store eating ice cream as we were wont to do in those hot summer days.  Johnny, a polio victim, had a leg with the girth of my arm, and he wore a brace from hip to ankle.   He got around pretty good though.  He could run to the ice cream truck as though it wasn't going to come around anymore.  Me too.  As we sat musing about the day's events, which weren't many, we looked up from our cones to see little Rita Millheim-- she was probably five years old then-- come out of the side door to her house and run across the lawn to her dad's Oldsmobile.  We watched as she got into the driver's seat, and before we knew it, the car with Rita in it was rolling into the intersection towards us, slowly at first, then quietly picking up speed.  It moved silently past us like the shark just missing Sheriff Brody's son.  In a standard transmission car like the Oldsmobile it was easy to let it coast without the engine running.  We didn't care about the mechanics of all this.  We just wanted to get out of the way.  Johnny was so shocked that he jerked his whole body backwards, knocking the back of his head on the pavement behind him.  There was ice cream all over his shirt and pants.  The Olds was veering now, heading down Arch Street, past us, but jumping the curb alongside the store.  As we peered around the corner, we saw the car up on the sidewalk and halfway into the wall of Whitey's basement.  It crashed through the wall.  Just weeks before my dad had built it on one of his moonlighting jobs.  And now it was demolished.  Worse yet, the car came through the wall, hunting down Helen Sodl, stopping just two feet from the piano on which she was practicing.  Where were Rita's parents, I wondered both silently and aloud. 

Several years later, as I was preparing (in my own slipshod way then) to embark on a cross-country hitchhiking trip with one hundred dollars in my pocket and a headfull of ideas, my parents and siblings were all too present.  My backpack was stuffed, but that didn't impede my mother and older sister from jamming into it various household items, including clothes pins.  All that was missing was the fabric softener.  It was as though they thought I was going to set up housekeeping out on the prairie somewhere.  The trip was filled with many adventures, including sleeping on a cliff on California's Highway 1, lining up my sleeping bag perpendicular to the dropoff so as to not roll off the edge in my sleep.

These days, I see my teenaged son going out the door alone on a regular basis into Philadelphia via mass transit, and my wife and I, we say "Wait.  When and how are you coming home?  Better yet, we'll come and get you."  Your mind races.  There he goes, off with little Rita Millheim in the Oldsmobile.  It's nuts, like sleeping on the edge of a cliff.