THE PATIENCE OF A GREAT PATRIARCH...

Grandpa Lawrence was a slender, gentle sort - one not often prone to losing his temper, and one who evidently valued his vocal cords enough that his tone rarely rose above a soft-spoken eloquent timbre. So it was not hard to suppose that for my dad and his brothers and sisters, even when it came to disciplining his sometimes unruly brood, Grandpa seldom rose above that soft level. It mattered not; he got his point across in a variety of ways - most of them fairly quiet, but nonetheless, quite effective.

As told by my father, this is a story of one such occasion where Grandpa managed to cure my father of one or more bad habits in a single fell swoop. Young dad, it seems, had apparently found himself a fairly large stick and was proceeding to tease the chickens in the coop, which ended up being a free-for-all of feathers, flying eggs, and squawking hens that usually meant an interruption of egg laying process. On a farm where these chickens were the bulk of the income, a day or so of lost egg revenue during the depression was a big loss to Grandpa's revenue. So, when dad got caught, and Grandpa gave him a reminder of what was to come when he caused such a ruckus, dad promptly bolted, and scrambled high up the huge oak tree next to the house. He was not about to come down and "take his lickin'", as he aptly put it.

Grandpa calmly watched him climb the tree, and promptly went into the house through the screen door, returning with a small chair and a newspaper. He propped the chair up under the tree, sat down quietly, opened the newspaper, and proceeded to read. An hour or so passed, with Grandpa still reading, and my dad still squirming in the uncomfortably hard branches of that tree. Lunchtime came, with Granny offering a nice plate of food to Grandpa, most likely complete with a fairly descriptive discussion over what Grandpa had on his plate, so that dad could hear, and salivate, over what his empty stomach was missing.

What seemed like quite a few hours passed in this same state of affairs, and it was getting on toward dusk, and suppertime, when dad finally "gave up the ghost", as they say, and began a painstakingly slow and reluctant descent down the big oak, where Grandpa was waiting calmly. Dad knew the routine. He collected a switch, and gave it to Grandpa to mete out his punishment. Dear old Grandpa, with his strong sense of justice, felt that 7 or 8 year old Johnny had enjoyed enough punishment on his backside by sitting in that tree for hours on end. Dad said that he never remembered the brief licking, but he definitely remembered looking down on his father's head for several successive hours, while his father commented out loud over the various articles, chortled over the comics, and made darn sure dad knew he had the patience of Job, and wasn't leaving his coveted spot under the tree until dad came down.

Apparently, he guessed correctly that several hours of thinking solemnly about what he did most decidedly ended dad's days of "funning" with the chickens. According to dad, he never messed with that chicken coop again, and from there on apparently opted to take his punishment right away from that day forward.