I was 15 when my father caught me early one evening smoking a cigarette out behind our barn.
For a long second, he just stared at me with those steel-blue eyes of his.
"Smoking, huh?" he spat finally. "Come with me, boy."
I knew I was in for it, because the only time he'd ever addressed me as "boy" was right before I got a whipping, which hadn't happened in almost two years.
As I pulled myself up from where I'd been sitting, I made up my mind that it wasn't going to happen this time. When you're 15, you're no longer a boy, but you're not quite a man, yet you think you are. And in the time since I'd last gotten a spanking, I'd matured, growing almost to my current height of six feet tall, and I was muscular from working on the farm and from the weight program our high school football coach had started.
No indeed. I bowed myself up and decided that I wasn't going to take a whipping, that if Daddy tried, I'd fight him. I was pretty sure I could take him, since I had a good three inches and about 25 pounds on him.
But he didn't go into the barn, but stalked toward the house. He looked back over his shoulder once to see if I was following, and when I kind of hesitated in uncertainty, he hollered again.
"C'MON BOY!" he yelled in that tone that told me I'd best do as he said. I trotted up behind him until he walked in the back door, where he told me to wait outside. A few seconds later, he came out with his keys and his wallet and told me that we were going to town. I was a little puzzled, but did what I was told. We got in his pickup truck and headed off to town.
We drove until we came to the nearest store, where he went in, then returned carrying a pack of cigarettes, Camel non-filters, and a box of matches. I started to get a little uneasy at that, because I had an inkling of what he was up to. I was right, and after it was over, I wished he had just whipped me.
He took the pack, opened it, fished a cigarette out, handed it and the matches to me, and ordered me to light up, as he turned the truck toward the highway. I fired it up, and when I went to puff on it, he growled at me to, "inhale the damned thing."
Now I'd been experimenting with Marlboro Lights, so you can imagine the effect the harsh smoke of the Camels had on me. That first wave of smoke attacked my lungs like a knife in the belly, and I coughed and hacked my way through that first one. When I was finished, he pulled out another one and told me to smoke it. I struggled through that one, with difficulty, and he handed me a third one and a fourth one. By that time, my head was spinning, I was dizzy and light-headed.
I made it through a fifth one, but I had only gotten a couple of puffs into the sixth one, when I croaked for Daddy to, "pull over." He'd just gotten the truck stopped on the side of the road when I threw the door open and puked all over the place.
I thought he'd take pity on me, but he made me struggle through six more of those Camels, during which time I got sick twice more. By the time he finally let up, I was dry-heaving and crying like a 6-year-old. Only then did he soften up.
"Now, son, if you want to smoke, I can't stop you," he said. "But I wanted you to learn that tobacco is poison and it'll kill you."
The lesson worked, because I never touched another cigarette. In fact, to this day, I get a little nauseous in the presence of any kind of smoke and any kind of tobacco.
That incident kept running like a bad memory through my mind as I sat at my kitchen table that Friday night trying to come to grips with my suddenly-tattered marriage.
A few hours earlier, I'd walked in on my wife in bed - our bed - with a young pissant loan officer from the bank where she worked. My emotions were in utter turmoil as I tried to figure out how it had happened, why it had happened and what I was going to do about it.
I was hurt beyond belief, angry and desponent. The thing was, I still loved her, and I think she still loved me. If I didn't love her, I wouldn't have cared, and if she didn't love me, she wouldn't have dissolved into whimpering guilt when we sat down afterward to try to start piecing our lives back together.
Let me explain. Claire was - is - the love of my life. We met the first week of school at the community college where we'd both gone. I was captivated by her looks and apparently she felt the same way about me. She's pretty, maybe not cheerleader-model pretty, but plenty good-looking, a brunette who has always worn her thick hair fairly long, usually just past her shoulders. She's a little taller than average, maybe 5-7, and nicely built, with a butt that's got just the right amount of meat and a healthy pair of tits in the 36C range.
We were compatible with each other from the first time we went out together, and fell in love in no time. Even then, however, Claire showed a couple of character traits that would get her in trouble. One was that she was very naive, and the other was that she was pretty easily led. She came from a very small town and had lived a very sheltered life. And she's always been quite shy, although she's gotten a little less so over the years.
On the other hand, I'd been around a little, which sounds odd for a guy who grew up on a farm. But I'd played all the sports at my high school, which kind of exposes you to a few different aspects of life. And while I may have grown up on a farm, I went to a high school that had been consolidated from the smaller schools in the county. So this was a pretty big high school, around 1,100 in grades 9-12.
I graduated from junior college with an AA degree in business, and went on to a larger college, but my heart wasn't in it. I was tired of school and I wanted to get married, to Claire. So not long after we turned 21, we did. She continued on to get a teaching degree, while I went out looking for a job.
Turned out, businesses weren't beating down the door for a guy with an AA degree whose grades were only so-so. When nothing good materialized, I swallowed my pride and took what I could find. Growing up on a farm, I'd learned all about machines, and I could tear down and rebuild a car engine in under an hour. So I went to work as an auto mechanic. Not very glamourous, but I quickly learned that a good, honest mechanic can make a very nice living.
Claire went to work as an elementary school math teacher, while I worked for a succession of auto repair shops, until after about 10 years, I was managing one. After 12 years of teaching, Claire got restless, and she had a standing offer from one of the banks to work as an assistant VP, so she quit teaching and went to work for the bank.
Along the way, we had three children, a daughter, Cindy, who's now 17, and two sons, Matthew, 14, and Alex, who's 12. They're good kids, well-behaved, and I give a lot of credit for that to Claire.
About the same time, I began to look at myself, and realized that while I was doing well, I wanted more. I wanted to branch into other areas besides auto mechanics, and I was tired of working for the other guy. I wanted to own my own business, and six years ago, the opportunity presented itself.
A rental business went up for sale, and I jumped on it. With Claire's help, I worked up a sound business plan and took it to her bank. We ended up getting a loan at a favorable rate to buy the company's stock, and rent on a location in a fast-growing area of our city. The business proved to be a big success. I may not have been an A student at junior college, but I absorbed a lot of knowledge on how to run a business, and I applied it to mine. We rent just about everything: wet-dry vacs, water pumps, electric generators, lawn mowers, weed-eaters, karaoke machines; you name it, and we can get it.
