He lifted me by back of my shirt collar, dragging me back to my bedroom. I recall my father being angry that I had struck my younger brother. These fits happened when they were angry. My parents had pulled my pants down numerous times to smash their open palms into it. This was not the first time I’d ever been spanked, keep in mind. It was at this sleepover that I first got paddled.
People often made reference to “Walter and Osgood.” We were the closest of buddies.įinally, as a third grader, I was invited by this best friend of mine to attend a sleepover at his home. By third grade, Osgood and I were the closest of friends. We both read a lot, and soon our friendship was cemented together. I had befriended Osgood because we were both “nerds.” We both spent many of our recesses reading a book, instead of gallivanting around the playground in tag, or pretending to be professional athletes as we tossed a football around. Their children were all on the honor roll at school. The mother was taking a correspondence course in order to become a full Minister in their obscure Christian sect.
The father was an engineer at a local small motor manufacturing facility. Like the hippies of the 1960s who ran “into the city, where the truth lies” as the musical said, these children of the 1980s ran to the country.
They lived in my small rural town, because they wanted to raise their children in a “Christian environment.” They didn’t want their children to attend school with non-Christians, Democrats, Homosexuals, or other figures. Each of them had a traditional Dutch name such as “Johanna.” Osgood was their first born son, but below him their four other children. So, the girl from New York City, and the son of a strict Dutch veteran of the Second World War, married. They converted to an extreme wing of the Christian fundamentalist movement, having both met the group at their college in upstate New York. They both ended up in my small, rural Ohio town because in college they had both had a religious conversion. His father was the son of a Dutch immigrant, and his mother was a woman who had been born in New York City. He and his family were nearly as odd as his name.
The friend was named Osgood, an odd name. I stayed the night with one of my best friends for the first time.
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