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On Punishment
There was a time when hamburger pretty much described Alpha and Omega in my limited food
sensibility. My grandparents didn’t much care, and in the realm of monitored eating, Bootie was a
pushover, but not the new girl on Second Street, Bud’s wife, brought home from Cincinnati after
WWII. Well, I remember the evening Helen prepared Chinese food, hardly a daring thing
anywhere now, but in those long gone days around Pittsburgh, radical cuisine. I shut my
nine-year-old mouth and flatly refused to eat it.
"You will eat it," said Helen, "if you have to sit there all night." She was right. At midnight I did
eat it. By then it tasted awful. But soon after the indignity, I discovered that miraculously I had
developed a universal palate. I could eat and enjoy anything.
When I was ten and eleven years old, I still made occasional assaults on my sister’s sexual dignity.
She was older, bigger, and stronger than me so there was little chance my vague tropisms could
have caused any harm, but even that slight chance ended one afternoon, when on hearing one of
these overtures, Pappy grabbed me abruptly behind the neck and back of a shoulder and
proceeded to kick me like a football, painful step by painful step, up the staircase to our
apartment.
On theft: having discovered where the printing office stock of petty cash was kept, I acquired a
dollar without asking. How Pap knew it was me I never found out, but when he burst through the
apartment calling my name in an angry bellow, I knew I had been nailed and fled to the bathroom,
the only door inside the apartment with a lock. Ignoring his demands to come out, with the
greatest relief I heard his footsteps grow faint and the front door slam. But no sooner had I
relaxed than he was back, this time with a house-wrecking bar. He pried the bathroom door off,
hinge by hinge. I still remember the ripping sound it made. But nothing else.
Almost every classroom in my junior high school and my high school had a wooden paddle hung
prominently over the classroom door, nor were these merely decorative. I was personally struck
about a dozen times in my school career; it always hurt. But it’s also fair to say that unlike the
assaults on my spirit I endured from time to time for bearing an Italian name at Cornell, none of
these physical assaults caused any resentment to linger—in each instance, I deserved some sort of
retribution for one malicious barbarism or another. I forgot the blows soon after they were
administered. On the other hand, I harbor a significant amount of ill feeling for those teachers who
humiliated me verbally; those I have no difficulty recalling.
It might seem from examples I’ve given that I believe some simple relation between pain and
self-improvement exists. But it isn’t simple—with the single exception of a teenage boy whose
pleasure came from terrifying girls, I never struck a single kid in three decades in the classroom.
What I’m really trying to call your attention to is that simplistic codebook of rules passed down to
us from academic psychology and enshrined as sacred text. Punishment played an important and
positive role in shaping me. It has in the shaping of everyone I’ve known as a friend. Punishment
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