I alway thought of my mother as a gentle woman. She was normally very understanding and always seemed willing to overlook or excuse the occasional slight. She most often took the high road by saying, “You never know what people have been through to cause them to act that way.”
Evidently she took a different tack when she was a child as I discovered in a passage in one of her many journals that I have fallen heir to:
I was little and thin, wiry and wild and loved. I loved people, days, and God with passions which I spread about. I loved physical combat and for my size enjoyed many victories. I learned to fight fair, so I enjoyed a certain amount of respect from my antagonists.
One of them Clark [Wren] (a cousin), his sister and my [younger] brother were in the kitchen one summer evening. Clark decided he wanted a drink out of the [unsanitary] water cooler by way of mouth. I’d been slapped [!] for that several days before. I was custodian of the water cooler.
I objected violently.
With his mouth still on the cooler he kicked out at me. I grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him off. He let the spigot go and put his arms around the cooler. I grabbed the mop and worked him over. He spun around and tried for my weapon. I drove the beautiful , dirty thing deep in his red and freckled face. Finally he took it away from me, and slapped me soundly.
I boiled over and closed in. He hit me twice with his fists hard enough to raise all of my remaining anger to the surface. I was out of my class. I was being boxed and I was not a (?) fighter. So I clawed him from elbow to short shirt sleeve while he relieved me of a tuft of hair.
By this time, our audience screamed for the mothers sitting in the moonlight on the front lawn. Was Clark’s mother mad? She was a beautiful titian-haired, pink cheeked goddess and her children were her children, right or wrong.
Mother poured campho phenique in his mouth, which was horrible because as soon as my anger passed I could not bear to have my victims suffer, and I cried profusely and wanted to kiss him, which he said if I did, he was going to “beat the hell out of me!” So he was taken home and had his mouth soaped out for cussing.
Then Mother made me spend the next hour writing him a letter of apology while I did my sobbing and examined my purple bruises.
Clark fought in Europe during the 2nd World War from Africa to the victory in Germany. He was never wounded. He says his only battle scars were from The Water Cooler Episode, which he still bears in little white marks on both forearms.