KC Wrapped In The Phone Cord. Ma Whipping That Butt.
By: Toni Crowe
Tags: Relationships, Family, Humor, Parenting, Short Story

Photo by Victor Lu on Unsplash

“If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?” Will Rogers

Do you remember land-line phones with long cords? The cords were stretchy curled wire. The one we had must have been twenty feet long. The phone was in the kitchen.

One day my mother was talking on the phone while cooking. Our house had a room off the kitchen that her six children were playing in. The room opened with a swinging door. Somehow most of the phone cord was in the room with us. We children, all six of us, had been told not to play with the phone cord. If the phone cord was damaged, the phone company had to come out to repair it. The phone would be out of service.

KC was third in line and the first boy. I was the oldest with another sister after me. KC picked up the phone cord and played with it. The cable was of no interest to the rest of us.

KC twirled the cord around, being careful not to pull it too much so that mom would not know he was messing with her cord. The stretchy material wrapped around him. He loved it. It was fun. In a few minutes, he was entangled in that phone cord with a big smile on his face.

As my mom ended her call, I think it occurred to him (and us) that perhaps he should not have wrapped himself up like a mummy in my mother’s telephone cord. As she hung up her call and pushed open that swinging door, everyone’s sense of self-preservation kicked in. Everyone, including KC, made a mad dash out of the room.

Image by Brett Hondow from Pixabay

Unfortunately, KC did not get far. He went as far as the cord allowed. By the time my mother walked into the room, KC was the only one in the room, laying on the floor wrapped in the cord like a bundle of hay.

There was no sign that anyone else had been in the room because, as his brothers and sisters ran away, we took our toys with us. If we had more time, we would have wiped the room for prints.

We heard our mother declare, “What in the world?” Next, she got her belt.

The spanking began, punctuated by her swinging with every word. She was whopping to the beat.

Didn’t. I. Tell. You. Not. To. Play. With. The. Phone. Cord? When. Are. You. Going. To. Listen. To. Me?

Ma stopped and unwrapped her crying son. By now, the rest of us had retreated upstairs, out of our mothers’ sight. Once she was in a spanking mood, best not to be seen. Once she drew the spanking belt, anyone she saw was in danger of a spanking.

The Lesson

Years later, we told this story on one of our Covid-19 caused family Zoom calls. One of our nieces was shocked that we ran away and left KC to face the music. She demanded to know why his brothers and sisters did not help KC get out of the cord.

We laughed. None of us had gotten any enjoyment out of that phone cord but him. All of us knew better than to play with Ma’s cable, but KC could not resist. Anyone caught with their hands on that cord would get “it.” We didn’t want “it.”

The lesson is, do not get involved with someone else’s craziness. If you didn’t do it, didn’t get any pleasure from it, have no skin in the game, then don’t get involved. This rule also applies to other people’s altercations and bar fights.

This lesson helped me immensely.

One example was a boyfriend who sidled up to ask me to lie about his whereabouts to the police. Without hesitation, I told him, “Duh, no.” I didn’t know where he had been or what he had done, and I didn’t want to know. I was not involved. Nor would I be involved. It turned out; his dumb ass was involved in a robbery. But I wasn’t.

As Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

***

Toni Crowe is a thirty-year award-winning Vice-President of Operations. She worked for United Technologies, Rockwell, and Honeywell, among others, ending her career at Ultra Electronics. Toni early retired to pursue her dream of bEcoming an author.

Her business book, ‘Bullets, and Bosses Don’t Have Friends, Navigate Tough Challenges at Work,’ is an Amazon Bestseller and won the 2019 Readers Choice Gold Award for Non-fiction Occupational.

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