Sticks & Stones

The summer I was six years old I received two spankings — one more than I deserved.

Sugar Jay was my best-friend, but she was as spoiled as her name implies. She would never do things my way. My mud pie recipe had specific ingredients. The perfect mud pie has a firm, creamy texture, but Sugar, one of those “whole earth” freaks, kept adding rocks, sticks and pine cones to the mix. I patiently picked the bits and pieces out of my mud and set them aside — as far aside as I could throw them.

We dug the hole for our mud pit into the embankment across the street from Gram’s house. Then we got Gram’s hose, put the garden nozzle on it, and drug it across the street. Sugar and I were the only two kids in the neighborhood to have a mud hole with water on tap.

Although we were across the street, technically we were playing at my house. Sugar’s home was half a block away and on a different street. Since we were playing at my house, we should have been playing by my rules, but Sugar didn’t see it that way. She kept putting crap in the mud.

Finally I had HAD IT! I ordered her to stop. She ignored me. I grabbed a handful of the twigs and sticks and rocks and slapped them down on her mud pie baking board. SPLAT! The teeniest, tiniest, little speck of mud may have splattered on her hands, stomach, chest, face and hair, but hey, it was nothing to cry about.

She let out a wail, stood up, kicked mud all over my feet, called me a poopy-diaper, and declared that she was going home. “Fine!” I yelled to her retreating back. Then I picked up the bittiest thumb-sized rock and hurled it after her, accidentally bouncing it off the back of her head. “Take your stupid crap with you!” I yelled.

Before I had finished rinsing the mud off my feet — some of it splashed all the way to my knees! — Gram came marching out of the house and grabbed me by my arm, hop-stepping the hose and I back home. It seems that Sugar told her mommy I threw a rock and showed her some bloody cut on the back of her head that I had supposedly caused.

Gram plunked me down on the kitchen stool and made me waste quite a bit of a perfectly good Saturday morning sitting there thinking about what a poopy-head Sugar was. Before I was allowed to leave the stool, Gram made me promise to never throw a rock again.

I promised, and even as a little kid I was very good at keeping promises. If I promised not to do something, I never again did it. For instance, from that day to this I never again threw a rock at anyone.

The next morning when I was out playing in the mud, Sugar joined me. She walked right up and poured a whole bucketful of rocks, bark, sticks, and pine cones on top of the mud hole. I let out a shriek and jumped to my feet. “Look what you’ve done!” I howled.

She knelt down, swirled a pine cone through the mud and began adorning it with rocks. “This is going to be beautiful,” she said. I snatched it from her hands and threw it down the street. Then I kicked mud on her feet — just to get even — except that she was sitting criss-cross and I might have gotten a bit of mud all over the rest of her, too.

She jumped to her feet, called me a poopy-head again, and yelled, “I’m going to tell!” She regally marched past me with her mud covered chin stuck up in the air and I just wanted to smack her. In fact, I took a couple of steps toward her, but she ran. I looked around for something to throw — but not a rock. I’d promised not to throw any rocks — and my hand wrapped around a big, spiky pine cone.

I tossed it as hard as I could at her retreating back. She was wearing her swimsuit and the pine cone hit her square between the shoulder blades — and stuck there. Oops. I hadn’t exactly meant for that to happen. I grabbed the hose and started back across the street, figuring I was in for another bout of chair sitting.

Sure enough, Gram came marching out the door before I got the hose completely put away and frog-hopped me into the house. She hefted me up the steps by my upper arm and marched me straight to the kitchen, but she didn’t sit me on the stool. She bent me over it and swatted my rear-end once with the wooden spoon. “I thought I told you not to throw things,” she scolded.

I stood there outraged, betrayed, with both my hands pressed to my offended bottom and sobbed, “But it wasn’t a rock!” Then Gram told me that I wasn’t to throw anything and she sent me to my room for the rest of the day to think about it.

I did think about it. I thought, and I thought and I thought. And no matter how I looked at the incident it was perfectly clear to me that I did not break my promise and I did not deserve that spanking. If Gram didn’t want me to throw anything, she should have just said so in the first place!