Here in the South, there is one consistency with how we deal with grief at a funeral. We're sad up to the echo of the last prayer, then the story-telling starts.
My favorite is the time my mother knocked my brother to his knees. On purpose.
OK, some qualification here: My parents were not spankers. Either we were good enough we didn't need it or stubborn enough that it wasn't really going to help. I'm going with the former, but I'm prepared to, grudgingly, admit I could be wrong.
We were stationed in Puerto Rico in a house laid out so the kitchen (and, during this story, my mother) was in the back and the front yard (where we and a motley collection of neighborhood kids were) was well in the front.
My brother was seven years older than I was, so he was 14 and a teenager and I was seven and a pain in the rear. On this occasion, he was sitting in a lawn chair, surveying the madness, while I was swinging a Raggedy Ann doll someone had left in the carport around by one of its legs. No clue. That's just what was happening.
Anyway, at some point in the doll swinging, I accidentally hit my brother in the shoulder. Soft doll, glancing blow, no blood, no foul. Except it elicited some sort of response, so, being an annoying little brother, I did it again.
My brother was equally patient with my goofiness and disdainful of my very existence, so he was going to let the first one pass. However, the second was a doll strike too far and he issued a warning that turned out to be the catalyst for what was to come. Like I had nothing to do with it.
"Hit me with that one more time and I'm going to throw you in that bush," he said, referring somewhat inaccurately to the hedge that surrounded our yard.
This, of course, is how wars start. And big brothers wind up getting hit with a Raggedy Ann doll. And little brothers wind up sailing into hedges.
Now aside from the indignation I felt, the actual sense of sailing through the air was kind of cool. So, this probably would have been a mere skirmish in the running war between brothers if, upon landing in the hedge and squirming around in an effort to get out, I hadn't suddenly started feeling sharp pains in various exposed-flesh areas.
The pains got worse. So much worse that all I could do was scream while running in place. Bees. My brother had the soon-to-be great misfortune of having thrown me in a bush where there was a bee's nest.
And here is where we have to acknowledge a virtual superpower that my mother, and most mothers have. They can hear a scream, identify it as belonging to one of their children, that it is a scream of pain and take immediate action.
My mother came out of the house like a short-ish, dark-haired Valkyrie. If Valkyries came from Oklahoma. With no evidence, she immediately assumed the role of judge, jury and executioner and exclaimed, "David, what did you do to your brother?" Then she hit him full in the shoulder, which was about as high as she could get.
It was, even from my dancing-up-and-down perspective, a pretty impressive punch. She shifted her weight back slightly, stepped forward, came with the hard right over the top a bit, rolled her shoulder and seemed to aim for a spot a few inches past impact. Joe Frazier always opted to work the body first, and he would have been proud. Dropped my brother like a rock.
The end of this story drove home three eternal truths for me. One, I would from that day forward know that my mother would always defend me, even if it was actually my fault. And that I should probably never mess with her.
And when my father came home I learned that he believed my mother, sight unseen and explanation unheard, with the sort of automatic faith born of love, trust and experience.
He saw my brother laying on the sofa, holding an ice bag to his arm (the ice bag had been intended for my bee stings, but, frankly, I was over it by then) and asked what had happened.
"Mom hit me," my brother said.
My father looked him up and down and summed up the entire experience. "Well," he said, "whatever you did, I bet you won't do it again."
And he didn't.
Commentary on 10/05/2018