When I heard the screams, I stopped dead in my tracks terrified, thinking a child was being murdered. It was a blood-curdling scream.
It took me a couple seconds to realize the child – far from being murdered – was just a spoiled brat throwing a vicious temper tantrum in a food aisle at Walmart in Sartell.
Turning my cart into the aisle, I saw the kid, a boy about 3 years old, his face hideously distorted by a purple rage, gripping his little fists rigidly while swinging his arms, stomping the floor with his spasmodic feet, all the while shrieking from a gaping, spit-spluttering mouth that looked like a cavern of Hell itself.
“Mommy, I want it, I want it, I WANT it!” he kept screaming as he pointed to something in the cookie section.
I thought to myself, gritting my teeth: “I’d give that kid more than a cookie. I’d give him a whopping he’d never forget.”
The furious demon’s mother didn’t seem the least bit upset at first. Then she became slightly flustered.
“Now you stop that right now,” she said to him in a weak sing-song voice, as if it were a line from a lullaby.
That set off the hellion even more, tears adding to spittle as he amped up his rage.
“If you don’t stop it right now, there’ll be no cookies for you, kiddo!” she said in a slightly louder voice, as if she almost meant it.
He was the cookie monster incarnate – the very uncute one.
I felt like asking the mama if I should dial 911 for an exorcist.
Her inability to tame the imp left me disgusted. I quickly moved on to another part of the store where I could still hear, from a distance, the screeching rampage, which would stop for a few seconds, then start all over again.
For days I could still hear, in memory, that tiny terror. I kept wondering what kind of me-me-mine delinquent he’s going to become in the future. The world owes him cookies, you know; it owes him a living. He’ll probably end up in jail, visited by his tearful mommy who will tell him once again in her lullaby voice, “You’ve got to stop doing these bad things, kiddo.”
Kiddo’s titanic tantrum caused me to flash back to when my brothers and I were brats. Mom would take us on the Fifth Avenue bus to grocery-shop at the Piggly Wiggly store in south St. Cloud, where Perkins is now. In the breakfast-cereal aisle, we tykes pulled that tantrum stunt, too, in an effort to get mom to buy certain cereal boxes, the ones with the really neat prizes. Like magic rings and little submarines that scooted around under water when you put baking soda in them. It didn’t take us kids long, though, to learn our tantrums were useless. They didn’t get us prizes; all they got us were swift slaps right across the butt.
Then we changed tactics, from crocodile tears and bellowing bluster to pitiful, heartbreaking pleas of “Please, mom? Puh-leeeeease?” as we looked mournfully like orphans at the cereal boxes we wanted. That worked. Sometimes.
Some say children should never be spanked. I disagree. The kindly Dr. Spock, he of the no-spank doctrine in the 1950s, was wrong. His Dr. Spock Baby Book, a huge bestseller back then, turned too many parents into namby-pamby permissivists caving into pint-sized whims. My own parents were much too permissive, and we grown-up kids now, a tad wiser perhaps, agree they should have spanked us more often, especially when we lazy lummoxes (my brothers and me) would lounge in front of the Motorola TV and argue whose turn it was to take out the garbage.
Of course, parents should never, ever beat a child, but a good spank or two on the butt is sometimes just what the doctor (other than Dr. Spock) ordered, especially if your kid is throwing an ear-splitting epic tantrum in the cookie aisle.
