My Pa,The Schemer
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The Electric Bed-Wetting Psych-Out Device I wet the bed until age eleven or so. Seems no big deal to mention now, seventeen years later. It seemed pretty big when sixth grade camp came around. Not the kind of camp where your parents send you over the summer because they don't want to deal with you. This was a stupid event that took place during the normal school year at a nearby summer camp, lasted three days and two nights. Even though it hadn't been much of a problem in the last few years, I was still worried about those two nights. It also prevented me from sleepovers a few times, but I eventually forgot about it. Around fourth or fifth grade, my father got a job on the other side of the state at Cook Nuke plant near Bridgman. A stable job 150 miles away was better than no job at home, so he borrowed his parents' camper trailer and lived in that during the week, drove home three hours each way on weekends. I probably wouldn't have known the word "psychology" at the time, but it was comforting to finally know that there was some cause & effect going on. After a few "dry" months, I began to regularly wet the bed Sunday nights, the night when Pa would leave for the week. Didn't seem so random anymore, so maybe it was something I could control. Unfortunately, Pa realized it was psychological too. He told me about this device he had read about that helped kids stop wetting the bed. You take two small sheets of metal screen, maybe a foot or two square. Place a piece of cloth between the two layers of screen, then wire them to a power source in such a way that the circuit is completed only if a liquid passes through the cloth layer and makes contact with both layers of screen. See where this is going? You slip the device under the bottom sheet of the kid's bed, and if he or she lets urine slip, it makes a circuit from the battery, through the urine, across the two screens, and follows the urine up to the kid. He drew some diagrams, and even bought parts for this contraption, but I can't remember the details of what size battery would be used, or if it would plug into the wall. He explained that it would just give me a little jolt, which would wake me up, probably stop me before I had let out more than an ounce or two, and I would be able to get up and go to the bathroom like normal. A few nights of this would likely teach me (not as a punishment, but as a form of conditioning) to get up when I felt the urge to piss. It never came to pass. I was already tapering off, so maybe that's why he never bothered to make the thing. But I remember he got parts from Radio Shack. Wires and bits and pieces. The one part that stands out in my mind is a bright red plastic switch that was supposed to light up when switched to the "On" position. These parts sat in a plastic bag in the pantry, waiting like all the other unfinished projects. To this day, I'm not sure if he really meant to make it and use it, or if he figured the threat of it would be enough to help my subconscious get me up during the night. Lord knows it would not have been out of character for him to buy parts for something and leave it years before putting it together. (See "Two Generations of Perpetual House-Builders," about how my father and his father spent most of their lives completing construction of their homes.) Considering the unnecessarily lighted on-off switch from a distance of two decades later, I suppose this was his idea of gently psyching me out. He had calmly explained the device to me, how it functioned, that it was intended to give me a light jolt, just enough to wake me. It wouldn't have taken him that long to put together. I could almost do the job myself in five minutes right now, although I'd surely end up electrocuting any child or adult that used it. Then again, maybe he didn't put it together because I had practically stopped. A two month dry spell, then I would wake up changing the sheets and he'd remind me about the device. So it must have been just the threat of it he was hoping to cure me with. And maybe it worked, because it tapered off around that time. Dried up, if you will. I don't think I'm emotionally scarred today as a result of all this. But if I were a parent today, I don't think I would correct my child by dropping hints of wiring up his bed to the wall socket. Budding Naturalist/Sparrow Assassin. |
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About that picture... Late Eighties, in the background is the river below Taquamenon Falls (yeah, you try to spell it). After he died in August 1990, there was a consensus among the family that this was the best picture to represent him. Not only was it recent, not only was it a great shot of the gleaming river and trees all around, but it's also a perfect representation of Pa. Frowning his customary frown, which I've inherited. Baseball cap in hand, binoculars hanging from his neck, no attempt at sucking in his stomach. The white line was some kind of defect in the film or in the developing process, but somehow it makes the photo more down-homey, like the imperfections you always see in fifty year old pictures. Built-in nostalgia, right from the drugstore where it was developed. Anyhow, if Pa had led a revolution in Latin America, or if he had been beatified and were now on the verge of confirmation as a saint, this is the picture his believers would haul through the streets or paint fifty foot high on buildings. |
