140. Gunsmoke

Since Agnes was younger than me, I can't tell you precisely why he reminded me of my father. A certain same Irish-ness showed on their features, but the personalities and quirks of each man were quite different. While Agnes always appeared to be hard nosed with a firmly set jaw, my father had a certain look of wonder in his eye and in fact he was perenneially enthusiastic in his pursuit of life. Maybe their mutual religiosity related them. They were alike and they were different at the same time.

Dad had children, of course, and I suppose that tempers a man and prepares him for a few surprises. With children, my brothers tell me, you loosen up or become psychotic. And of course, not all of my father's sons were as perfect as yours truly. My little brother was quite a handful. Every time I think of him, the smell of gunpowder comes to mind.

It's the same smell from a freshly fired roll of caps in a silver toy pistol. The kids on my street didn't exactly play cowboys and Indians. We just liked to shoot at each other. I always wondered how the "nice" kids in our school's Boy Scout troop used cap guns. You know, the kids whose uniforms were more than just the shirt and neckerchief, but included the pants, spats, the special belt and buckle and an overseas cap neatly folded over their belt. I'll bet those boys played cowboys and Indians in a responsible manner. I imagine each side would later put down its weapons, shake hands and come up on the veranda to share a pitcher of Kool Aid. I'm sure a "Jolly Good Show, old boy" was heard in their conversation. "Old Meltzer really took your measure today, Franklin." But I knew very few boys in our neighborhood who might pass for gentlemen. Such well behaved children lived elsewhere in the city or on television shows that my parents liked to watch, or in some kind of parallel universe populated by angelic little darlings who probably didn’t even play with guns.

But a typical young gunslinger on our block would have been my little brother Micky. In 1959 when I was sixteen, he was eight years old and, when he wasn’t holstered up with two six-shooters hanging on his hips, he carried a small derringer cap pistol in his pocket wherever he went. Unfortunately, he had a habit of pulling it out and firing off a few rounds at the most inappropriate times. He almost turned our baby cousin’s baptism ceremony into chaos when a kid from school he didn’t like showed up at the church. Micky jumped up in the pew and cussed the kid out with G-rated invective from a favorite cowboy movie … something about a lily livered polecat, I think. Micky had the derringer half out of his pocket when Dad quietly disabled his gun arm with a pincer-like grip that left him with a sore elbow for the rest of the day. Too bad my father had not been present to save a quartet of Gospel Witnesses on our front porch the previous week.

Eddie Izzard on Religion.