My mother spent the first dozen years of my life scaring me to death.
She had a litany of "no's" that would fill a book. "Don't touch the stove, don't play in the traffic, stay away from that dog, don't talk to strangers, keep giggling all night and a monster will get you. If you put your lips on that drinking fountain - you'll die."When she was sure I was clinically paranoid, she eased up a bit, but I will never forgive her for not warning me of the most feared threat of all time: my permanent record card.
I never heard of it until one day in the third grade, Ray Slocum thought Miss Ruskin was facing the blackboard and couldn't see him, so he got out of his seat, made a face and shimmied, twisting his behind in circles. She twirled around and shouted, "Ray Slocum! That little incident is going on your permanent record card."
We had no idea that a permanent record card even existed, but the importance of it eluded no one. It meant that Ray Slocum probably couldn't get a job, go into the service, get married, have a family, buy a house or sign up for credit - all because he wriggled his behind when he should have been making a bas-relief map of Brazil. He was lucky they let him use the restroom for the remainder of the year.
It was the ultimate punishment. We could get detention for the rest of the year, erase blackboards every night of our lives, go to the office and get a lecture from the principal, write 5,000 words on Lewis and Clark, but please, God, don't let the misdemeanor be recorded on our permanent record card - in permanent ink.
In my senior year, Dottie Sullivan and I skipped home ec because it was a nice day and we didn't feel like reading about leavening agents. The incident was duly recorded on our permanent record cards. The nun wrote behind it, "Showed no remorse." There it was. A lifetime of exemplary behavior down the toilet.
Dottie and I graduated, applied for jobs and got on with our lives. We waited for our past to catch up with us. It never did. We never had one employer ask to see our permanent record cards.
You know what I think? I think it's the old J. Edgar Hoover bluff. Here he was terrorizing the Kennedys, Jane Fonda and Dr. Martin Luther King with all that wiretapping and spying. But he didn't have the real goods on them - their permanent record cards.
They are all misfiled in every school basement in the country, waiting to be pitched to make room for the current ones. They served their purpose.