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Show or letter and paste in such renderings as "Cumpsy" or "Coolmansee" or "Dr. Cul, M. E. E." As he grew older and his writing shakier, he could add even weirder misspellings to his album. One incident of our relationship I remember with shame. It was the affair of the revolver. When I was seven I longed for a toy Colt .45 or reasonable facsimile thereof that some of my companions had obtained. They strutted about wearing this six-gun complete with holster and cartridge belt. Those of us who had no such awesome armament had to act the part of frontier culprits hustled into "jail" by the "mar-shall" or we had to be Indians who bit the dust ingloriously. I begged for one of those toys until I must have been a pest. Although I did not fully sense it, Father's health was again beginning to decline. He had, as I mentioned, a deeply sensitive and emotional nature. He felt too keenly with his patients and sorrowed over ones who died. These pangs upset him so that especially on weekends, he would be ill with headache and nausea. The nervous disturbance made him irritable at times, against his genuinely sunny nature. As the Fourth of July approached, a variety of play guns appeared in store windows: six-guns, snub-nosed cap pistols, even a few toy rifles and bayonets. I simply had to own a cap pistol. Mother at the time was busy as an officer in a women's welfare group. Also she may have had some doubts as to the wisdom of filling a small boy's life with warlike toys. At any rate she'd put me off with "Oh, you don't want it so soon, do you? You'll break it or lose it before the Fourth," or "Pretty soon. You can have one when the right time comes." One morning the boy next door burst forth brandishing a new cap pistol, blazing away at me and demanding that I fall wounded or dead to please his already over-swollen vanity. I couldn't stand it. Surely enough days and weeks had passed. Caps, firecrackers and "torpedoes" were beginning to explode all over town. Could I endure |
