One day when he was ten years old, David wandered into a convenience store near the school bus stop with four-year-old Chuck. As they stood in front of a shelf full of candy, David looked around. Was anybody watching? he wondered.
I could steal some of this candy, David thought. Then he scooped up a handful of peanut butter cups and slipped them into his pocket. Glancing around, he was sure that no one saw him do it. David breathed a sigh of relief. That was easy! he thought, and he filled the other pocket.
David picked up a large candy bar and headed for the cash register. He tried to be casual as he placed the candy bar on the counter and handed the cashier the money.
“Son, will you step around here please!” The man’s stern voice startled David. How could he know? David wondered. He had no idea that his bulging pocket had given him away.
Walking around the counter and facing that man was one of the worst moments of David’s life. His parents had taught him how important it is to be honest. David knew he had done something really bad — and he had been caught.
The cashier called David’s mother. “You’ll have to come down to the store,” she told Mrs. Robinson.
While the boys waited, Chuck kept telling David, “I’m going to tell! You are going to be in so much trouble.”
By the time his mother arrived, David was crying. Other shoppers, some of them friends and neighbors, watched as David confessed and apologized. Then his mom took David home and spanked him. She even spanked Chuck for going along with the crime.
David’s father was at sea, so David had to wait several weeks for him to get home. All that time, he worried. What will my father do?
But when his dad got home, he just talked to David. He didn’t spank him. Mrs. Robinson had already done that. He also knew David felt really bad about what he had done. Just the waiting and worrying about what would happen when his father came home had been punishment enough for David.
Perhaps one reason David had been so worried about his punishment was because he’d never forgotten an earlier incident. When David was six or seven years old, he was watching television and absentmindedly began to poke a small pocketknife into the arm of his father’s leather recliner. He wasn’t trying to damage the chair on purpose. He just wasn’t thinking about what he was doing.
When David got up from the chair, he looked down and saw what he had done. Uh-oh, he thought. I did that!
When David’s father saw the ugly holes in his favorite chair, he was angry. “For every hole in this chair, I am going to spank you once,” he said.
Poor David! That was a long spanking, but he learned an important lesson about how to treat other people’s property.
David loved doing things with his father. In fact, whenever Ambrose Robinson worked around the house, David was usually by his side.
David watched as his father repaired their family cars. First, his dad would get a Chilton manual and read the instructions. Then he and David would put on some work gloves and crawl under the car. He taught David — and himself — to do most repairs.
When he needed a Phillips-head screwdriver, David’s dad would send him for one. If he came back with the wrong one, his father would explain the difference and send David back for the right one.
In addition to repairing cars together, his dad bought electronic kits, and he and David put together radios and televisions by following the instructions that came with the kits.
David quickly learned to read instructions and follow them. He knew the difference between a transistor, a diode, and a capacitor. And he could identify all the tools in his dad’s toolbox.
One day as he watched his father repair the family car, David wondered how he had learned to do so many things. “Dad, did you go to Dad School or something?” he asked.
When David, Kim, and Chuck got home from school each day, they would find their mother’s chore list on either the refrigerator or the bulletin board. Sometimes David would cook dinner and Kim would wash the dishes. Or their mother might have instructed them to mow the lawn, trim the shrubs, vacuum the floors, or take out the garbage. Even when they were small, David’s parents expected them to help out around the house.
David and his brother and sister were also expected to attend church and Bible study. When he was a baby, David’s mom would leave him in the church nursery. But when he was three years old, he began staying with her during the services at least some of the time. If he misbehaved in church, she corrected him. She thought, If he can’t sit through a service for an hour or two, how will he sit still in kindergarten?
Unless she had to work, Mrs. Robinson attended church every Sunday, and she always took her children with her. When they were teenagers, David, Kim, and Chuck started asking their mother, “Do we have to go?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Robinson replied. “The Lord has been good to you this week. You owe it to him. We all need the Lord. And you might learn something new.”
David’s mother didn’t make her children go to church when they were sick. So sometimes they would tell her that they had a headache or a stomachache. She would answer, “Okay, but sick people don’t get to have any activities. If we go skating or bowling or out for ice cream later today, you won’t be able to go with us.” Usually the “sick” child quickly recovered and went on to church.
One November day when David was in grade school, he came home and told his mother, “The teacher wants us to bring in four cans of food for the Thanksgiving baskets. And she wants us to give her the names of poor families. They’ll select five names for the Thanksgiving baskets.”
That afternoon, David’s mom was tired. She worked every day, yet she was the mother who ended up driving David and a lot of other children to all the baseball and football practices. And it seemed like David, Kim, and Chuck were always bringing home notes from school asking for something.
Irritated, Mrs. Robinson told David, “Every time I turn around, it’s give, give, give. This is the poor house right here. Our name needs to be in that drawing.”
His mother didn’t mean what she said, but David took her seriously. He put their name in the drawing at school for the Thanksgiving food baskets and in a similar basket at church.
David’s mother was shocked when she received a phone call from the teacher. “Freda, you are trying to be slick. Why did you have David put your name in for a poor basket?”
That call was followed by another one from David’s Sunday school teacher. “Freda, we caught you! David put your name in for a Thanksgiving basket. But it didn’t work!”
After Mrs. Robinson assured both the callers that the family was fine, and David had simply misunderstood, she had a talk with her son. “Mama, I was only trying to help. You told me this was the poor house,” he told her.