Disagreements

As a small child, I had a mind of my own. I was a all around trouble maker though I never tried that hard, it just seemed to happen. Family dinners now are full of joy and laughter and stories of my antics are told over and over again. I had a real fascination with tools and tape from the beginning. No screw was safe when I had a screw driver in my hand and no tool was safe when I had black electrical tape.

I was probably three or four and Mom was a work. Dad worked a ranch job so he was home with us for a while. He and Sam were sitting in his chair watching TV when a silence crept over him. It was one of those eerie silences that happen when something wasn't right. I had been playing on the floor, not paying a lot of attention to what was going on on the TV. My patch of carpet was empty now and my blond head was no where in site. That was bad, normally I was doing something I wasn't supposed to when I disappeared like that. Resolutely, Dad got up and set Sam down in the chair so that he could go and find out what I was doing.

Our house had a back door and a front door. The front door was large and made of heavy wood, and lead into the mud room where coats were hung. Between the mud room and the kitchen was a hollow plywood door that had a corner chewed off from the dogs, but that made a pretty good door for the cats so that they could get into their litter box. A strait shot across the kitchen was the laundry room and main bathroom. The back door left the laundry room and opened up to the yard outside. There was a metal door that led to the outside, but between the big door and the laundry room, we had a flimsy wooden screen door. It was probably home-made and its only purpose was so Mom could open the door and let the air circulate without bugs and things getting in. Turning right out of the kitchen brought you to the dining room which, taking a right out of that room, lead you to the living room, Dad's chair, and my secretly vacated bit of carpet.

It didn't take dad long to find me, though I was being exceedingly quiet. I had found a screw driver in my play and, from there, ventured into the laundry room before I proceeded to take all of he screws out of the old wooden screen door. The door was the only thing that I could find that had the proper screws that fit my new found screwdriver. That was how Dad found me, crouched down with all the screws from the bottom three-fourths of the door, except for the last one which I was taking out at that point in time. I think that I would have managed to take the other's out sooner or later, but I hadn't gotten a chair yet.

My Dad is six foot two inches tall and built kind of like a bear. At the time I was a scrawny three year old, barley three feet tall, and built kind of like a stick person. He was always gentle, but you didn't think twice about not doing something when you were told to do it. On this occasion he just looked at me for a moment, and the guilt began to wash over me, I really did know that I shouldn't be taking the screws out of the door, but it was fun and I was mutinous. Once my dad raised his voice though, the discussion was over and I knew that I had lost. He made me put every screw back in that door, nice and tight. When you are three or four, something you would have considered fun a moment earlier looses its appeal when you are forced to do it. But the screws were back in, and my pants remained untouched by a sharp slap. Mom never did spank my sister and me, but Dad had been known to when we were really bad.

I guess that the "conflict" didn't have a lot to do with an old wooden screen door. It was more of a "busy-hands-need stilling". It wasn't that I had taken the screws out of something, I took the screws out because the screwdriver was there and so was the screen door. Dad was trying to show me a responsibility for what I was doing.