Poppy was not one to be harsh with discipline.
Only once do I recall him administering a spanking and then he used a limp palm frond. Some time about my age of four, I was very angry about something now long since forgotten and I took a pair scissors to the left long sleeves of his cotton work shirts and cut as high as I could reach above the elbow.
For several years he would wear these shirts with the right long sleeve in tact and the left sleeve cut off on the arm that he placed on the pickup truck window driver’s side. His left arm always had a deep tan.
My punishment was seeing him in the shirts, his silent treatment about the scissor-cutting incident, and his very tan left arm. At age seven, I was riding with him in the truck when a man at the cotton gin asked him what had happened to his shirt.
Poppy replied, “Oh! A little rat chewed on it.”
As we drove away, I finally expressed my guilt and bravely said, “I am that rat”.
Poppy looked at me with his cool blue eyes and smiled in a bemused manner. Finally he took a long slow breath and asked me, “Is it time to cut the tail off of that rat?”
I sided up to him and he put his right arm around me and held me close for several miles as we drove in silence.
Finally the silence was broken when he pulled into the rural
country store and said, “Time to buy some new work shirts”,
We did exactly that and drove back to the ranch, marched into the house headed for his closet, and took all the cut
(rat chewed) shirts and removed them.
The shirt fabric became work cloths. I used some of them over 15 years later to wash and scrub my car and to wipe the oil dipstick. Now sixty years later. I found the remnants of one of the backs of one of the shirts and the front pocket side cut and stitched together into a kitchen towel.
Good cotton and good people endure and age softly.
Entry – July 31, 2007
