My flight home from Atlanta

The paddle has held a special place in my fantasies for many years but that wasn't always the case. I had heard of paddlings but I never paid much attention to them until I made a business trip to the southern US in the early nineties.

I flew into Atlanta the day before my meeting, rented a car, drove to the site and stayed in a local hotel. The next morning, there was a local newspaper the outside my door when I left the hotel. I stuffed it into my bag and went to my meeting. Afterward, I drove back to Atlanta and found out that my flight home was cancelled. There was another flight later that night so I killed time in the airport. I read everything I had with me and eventually I was so bored that I started to read the newspaper that was still in my bag. There was a story about a board of education meeting where parents had complained that their daughter had been paddled because she had parked her car with the wheels off the edge of the pavement and on the grass beside the parking lot. That seemed like a rather minor transgression to me and I've certainly parked straddling the edge of the parking spot on occasion but her principal obviously felt differently and she was given 4 swats of the paddle. Her parents complained that this was excessive but the board rejected their complaint. I didn’t know that paddling was still routinely used in the southern US (and it still is) and I certainly didn’t know that girls old enough to drive could be paddled.

My flight finally left and I had almost two hours siting in dark on a quiet airplane with the man in the seat next to me sleeping. All I could think about was the story about the girl being paddled. As time went on my imagination started to fill in the details that were missing from the newspaper story and by the time we got back to Toronto I was so excited that I could nearly explode. I managed to get through customs with out attracting attention but I couldn’t leave the airport parking lot before I had taken the time to relieve the excitement. The paddle has held a special place in my fantasies ever since then.

There is a follow up to this story but I will save it for another time.

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