Of the few memories I have left from my early childhood, those that weren't purged during the brain-cell stomping—and enhancing—collegiate years, there is one incident that still burns. At the lucky age of 7, I am standing on top of a doghouse in the back yard of the house across the street from ours, peering over the fence as I watch my mother, marching through the neighborhood with a bright-yellow yardstick in her hand (her disciplinary weapon of choice), hunting for me.

The word was out: “That red-headed kid over on Kivet Court started this fire!”
Tears are streaming down my face, and through my teary vision, I can see thick smoke spiraling toward the sky from the parking lot of the apartment complex just outside our subdivision. The sirens have stopped, and now there is a lot of yelling from the firemen, who have so graciously come to put out something that started off as a simple match-lighting game. Turns out, flicking lit matches into trash dumpsters isn't as much fun as it seems. I wasn’t the only one doing this dastardly—and stupid—deed, but I was the only one who was caught.
Months earlier, I was having some kind of argument with a friend down the street (this is another memory that has been spared), and during this argument I put my fist through his parent's glass “screen” door (jeez, an angry little tyke, eh?). My hand was bleeding profusely, so I did what any other juvenile delinquent would do after shattering someone else's window: I ran.

I didn't get very far before the tears started clouding my vision (I cried a lot back then), and I collapsed on the sidewalk a few houses down, in a pool of blood and tears. My “friend” ran to tell my mom, and soon I saw a teary outline of my mother running down the street toward the site of the incident, with that bright yellow yardstick in hand, looking like a Katana sword. It turned out that she was sewing at the time of the “big news” and she left the house in such a panic that she forgot to put the yardstick down, although that baby sure came in handy when she found me. It was then that the Yardstick Era of Punishment began.

To this day I still cringe a little when I see a yardstick, or one of those paddle-ball games (a wooden paddle with a long, thin rubber band attached, and a rubber ball on the end of it). After a few broken yardsticks, we graduated to the paddle. The rubber band on my paddle-ball set broke (no doubt due to some fit I had thrown), and my resourceful parents recycled the paddle. Thankfully, my father chose to donate the leather belts he no longer wore to Goodwill.

I was indicted for an awful lot of things as a child, and in nearly every case, the red hair was what witnesses remembered most. As the only redhead on Kivet Court, and every street we lived on after that, I rarely got away with anything. Years later, at the all-knowing age of 15, I was sitting in my room, serving a grounding sentence. Bored, I started to do some math and realized that out of the previous five years, I had been grounded for two of them.

Two years of being grounded meant a couple things: first, grounding didn't appear to be working, and second, I was causing a lot of grief to my family, and if I kept all of this trouble up, I was probably going to end up in prison, which is just like being grounded, only your parents aren't there to yell at you, I thought. Like I said, it was the all-knowing age. I also used to think that if I dyed my hair brown, I wouldn't get in nearly as much trouble, since I would've blended in.

I'd like to say that I had a revelation right then, but it still took a couple years before I was able to slough off that whole part of my life. It took getting rid of some bad friends, and finding new ones who weren't all that interested in breaking all of the rules.

So now, 31 years after that dumpster fire, I look at my three-month old precious baby boy, and I see those little strands of red hair starting to cover his bald head, and I think: son, for your sake and mine, I really hope discipline problems aren't genetic. The missus has expressed similar concerns, of course. Our hope is that mommy's angelic childhood (and life, for that matter), will counterbalance the devilishness of daddy's childhood and level the little guy out.