Replies

My children got a whack for two reasons, for safety rminders and for exceeding the limits set for them. It seemed to work fine.

I was more likely to fan my son's behind over exceeding limits, talking disrespectfully to his mother or myself, and lying. Regarding safety reminders, I didn't have a problem there at all---my son was so safety conscious he could drive you nuts reminding you about safety stuff, which I thought was pretty clever of him.

Even though his mother and I divorced two years ago, he's held up very well. He came to town for the holidays (his mother and grandmother came to spend the holidays with her sister on the other side of town) and we spent a boatload of time together. And he remembered, to the woman with whom I now share my life, how it was curtains if I'd ever caught him lying.

But he also remembered what happened when he got into a spot of trouble at school and, when I picked him up later in the day, he came right out and told me what happened without trying to flinch or hide---and how I told him he wasn't about to get into more trouble because he'd told me the truth.

That meant the world to me.

I had the pleasure of having him sit in twice while I did my weekly radio show. (I'm on a Las Vegas station Monday nights at nine PST, doing a comedy show the old-time way, complete with sound setting scenes and, I hope, humour between your ears and not between your legs.) I even put him on the air, wrote a couple of lines in each week's script for him, and he handled them like a pro. That's something he'll remember the rest of his life, not to mention getting bragging rights on his friends back home.

He nailed me on the phone last night, though. "Hey, Dad, where'd you get those jokes?" I told him I wrote them myself. "You wrote those jokes? Hey, those are funny!"

The dear boy . . .