I always rolled my eyes when my mother started the, “Back when I was a kid …” spiel. You know what I mean, right? “I had to walk two miles to school in snowstorms. Uphill.” “I had to eat everything that was put in front of me.” “If I got anything less than an A on my report, my father would have killed me.”
The subject of school brought on a whole new list of woes from my mother. Evidently if you were really bad, you got hit with a ruler by the teacher or, for especially bad offenses, the wooden paddle in the principal’s office. My mother avoided these tidbits of corporal punishment doled out in loco parentis because she was a “good child”.
I was not.
By the time I was in school, the ruler and the paddle had given way …