My mother had been a keen equestrian. However, when I was barely in my formative years she was thrown from her horse. This, unfortunately, left her in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. On reflection, I feel at this time I was lucky enough to have my father still around. If I had done […]

I don’t remember all the events of this particular incident. Mom and I were getting ready to go out for the day to see mom’s best friend Toni and her daughter Linda, who was a year younger than me. Mom had told me this was going to be a ‘dress-up event in which I would […]

My parents met while my father was in the army and stationed in Germany. I was born in the US but by the time I was in 5th grade, my parents separated. Things got hectic, and my mother and I moved back to Germany and moved in with her brother. It was a big old […]

My birth mother died when I was just six years old, and for the next three years it was just me and Dad. Because we had both been through a lot, I guess it’s true to say that he indulged me a lot more than I would have normally been. I have (very vague) memories […]

When I was in the third grade in the 1990s, my best friend was Cory, who lived about four blocks away from our house. One day, I went around to his place to play as my mom had to go out shopping with a girl friend of hers. We dug Cory’s softball glove and ball […]

My name is Brenda, and I was born in 1954. I received my early education at a Catholic parochial school in a small New England town. During those years I received corporal punishment at school only once. That was in the third grade, but my story really begins a year earlier. In 1961 I began […]

I was never very good at spelling – and that lack of ability led to my first and only school paddling, back in the 1980s. I was in second grade at a school in Atlanta, Georgia, when one day our class teacher, Miss Harvey, announced the spelling test out of the blue. We would be […]

It is one of the ironies of my high school life that I got one of my most painful paddlings from my favorite teacher. The factors that contributed to how much it hurt adjust to how thin my gym shorts were, and the fact that she was a fit young lady with strong arms. Coach […]

St. Thomas Aquinas School for Boys was a small boarding school outside New Orleans that ran from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1950s when it finally closed down in a period of reorganization by the local bishop. With fewer and fewer parents willing to send their boys away to boarding school as early as […]

I remember in my formatives years a time where my mommy and daddy treated me out to a drive in movie. I was told that before we left I would have to take a bath. Before we left, Mom told me to take a bath. Once I had got out of the tub, I was […]