Family fun in the 1950s meant tone-deaf Pop tootling a rusty trumpet, Sis shaking a tambourine, Junior thumping a drum kit, and crazed from diet pills, Mom plinking and plunking an untuned upright piano.
Other families rowed a rickety wooden boat out onto a lake to cast hooks baited with nightcrawlers. They hoped to catch rainbow trout to roast over a crackling campfire while Ma and Pa drank themselves silly on Blatz beer, preparing to skinny dip once the kids and Fido fell asleep in the lopsided tent.
We Days bonded at our grandparents’ ramshackle cabin in the Southern California mountains by engaging in massive water fights when visitors paid a visit. Boys versus girls, water battles began with squirts from plastic pistols, escalated to splashes from pots and pails. Mom strategized with my three sisters and our female guests. Despite arthritis limiting his ability to charge across uneven terrain carpeted with pine needles and cones, Dad, the general, deployed our male guests and me. Sneak attacks, gasps when we got soaked, shrieks of laughter.
In acts of catharsis, Dad doused Mom for needlessly spending us into debt, Mom doused Dad for making her work a Rose Parade parking lot instead of going to a New Year’s Eve party, my younger sisters Laurel and Candy doused me for demanding we watch wrestling instead of cartoons, I doused my older sister Doreen for monopolizing our lone bathroom.
The battle’s even until I emulated John Wayne in “Sands of Iwo Jima,” commandeered our neighbors’ high-pressure hose, cackled, blasted away at my little sisters. They complained I’m cheating, but all’s fair in water fights.
As a cabin leader at a church camp for teenagers in the San Gabriel Mountains when I was in my early twenties, I had no idea what happened the previous summer, but I quickly realized kids have brought hundreds of balloons to fill with water. I figured it’s better for the adults to manage the impending water war than let it spin out of control, resulting in broken bones, shattered windows or demonic possession.
Even though I delivered homilies about turning the other cheek and blessings bestowed on peacemakers, I channeled my inner Joshua and devised a plan to topple a Jericho peopled by adolescent girls. First, I positioned two bucket-laden boys atop our cabin. Inside were poised a dozen boys cradling water balloons. I visited a girls’ cabin and invited them to visit us for a wonderful surprise. When they arrived, I motioned them to sit on the ground facing away from our cabin and close their eyes. Joshua’s men blew horns, I signaled my troops with the clangorous buzz of a kazoo.
The girls opened their eyes just as a deluge of water crashed onto their perfectly arranged hair. The cabin door swung open and my “Israelite” army stormed out, flinging balloons in every direction. The girls scrambled to their feet and fled back to their cabin, drenched and defeated. We boys laughed and congratulated ourselves. The Canaanites had been routed.
Alas, our barrage caught one of our cabinmates. He was flirting with a blonde when I arrived at her cabin with our invitation and—oblivious to our plan—he sat beside her during the ambush. He promised revenge, and he possessed dozens and dozens of balloons.
In the middle of the night, the door opened on our bunkbeds, and the turncoat and his giggling marauders hammered our slumbering selves with balloons. As we cowered, soaked in our sleeping bags, they retreated into the darkness. When my cabinmates expressed outrage about such treachery, I quieted them with words: “All’s fair in water fights.”
In June of ’84, a few weeks into my eleven-month journey to the tip of South America, I reached Cuernavaca, Mexico by bus and was staying in a cheap hotel with a fetid toilet down the hall. I’d been lonely, a pigeon had pooped on my head in the plaza, and my stomach was still unsettled. Fortuitously, at a café, I met three women and Gus, a Mexican businessman who shares my February 12 birthday.
Gus asked me if I wanted to ride into the hills where he was going to sign papers to sell a property. While he met with his client, I was drawn to music and laughter at a two-story mansion across the road. With the gate opened, I peeked beyond the walls. Gus and I were invited to join a party: volleyball, dancing on the grass, a steak barbecue and as a finale, a gigantic battle with buckets of water.
I was untouchable. I tossed water up at combatants standing on a balcony, while they unloaded water toward me. They got drenched and only a few drops struck me. Laughing at the futility of their efforts, I chased others around the yard, hitting them with my water and dodging theirs. The more they ganged up on me in frustration, the more elusive I became. I felt like I was shielded by a sombrero and serape made of oilskin.
As Gus and I departed, I grinned, waved both hands in triumph, and shouted, “Adiós, amigos!” Not two blocks away, I discovered I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so we had to return. Gus crept his Vee Dub beyond the wall into the yard. His window and mine were down, so we were defenseless against two buckets of cold water suddenly hurled from both sides by gleeful assailants. All the guests roared with laughter at the sight of our stunned, dripping faces.
Enduring travails on the Gringo Trail in the months ahead, I lift myself out of despondency with the memory of an afternoon when I was reminded that all’s fair in water fights.
Mom loved our water wars as much as anyone, so at a family lunch after her ashes were poured into the ocean off Newport Beach, I challenged my sister Candy’s four little grandchildren to a battle royale with balloons and Super Soakers. Grandma Candy and Auntie Laurel introduced the kids to this family tradition several years ago, so they grew excited at the thought of skirmishing with old Uncle Ormie, in town from Maryland in the summer of ’21.
The next day at Candy’s house in Manhattan Beach, I plotted an ambush with Laurel, deluding myself that she was my loyal ally against our seven-year-old nephew Dean, the seven-year-old twins Candice and Katherine, and nine-year-old Caroline.
I awaited word from Laurel, sitting at a metal table in the patio, chatting with the twins’ dad, when the pitiless pipsqueaks followed Candy’s master plan and sucker punched me with water delivered in various forms. By the time I swam through a wall of torrential rain—much of it gushing from a hose in Laurel’s hands—to reach a wading pool full of water and balloons, I looked like a drowned rat with liver-spotted paws. Out of shape at age seventy-five, I long ago had lost my ability to shape shift out of water’s way.
Nearly blinded by the onslaught, I grabbed a few balloons, but the kids had underfilled them for fear they’d burst, so they bounced harmlessly off my sisters. Finally, I found a small pail and began to scoop and fling just as Candy incapacitated Laurel’s hose by bending it. Trying not to be hit using a technique taught by her dad, Candice zigzagged, but what might work on the beach during D-Day didn’t transfer to a patio…so she got pelted like the rest of us.
I fled into the house, filled a large bowl in the kitchen, and scampered to a door behind the inflatable pool. After a relative opened the door for me, I cascaded the water on an unprepared sister, and shut the door. Several times I repeated these blindsides, though they were met with cries of “Hey, that’s not fair!”
Afraid I’d slip on the wet bricks or have a heart attack from laughing so hard, I became a spectator inside. Standing on a thick towel in front of a plate glass window, I watched transfixed as Laurel, Candy and our diabolical descendants waged a ferocious hourlong battle that Dean described as not merely epic, but legendary. Later, I’ll regretted my transformation from passionate warrior to passive witness when the kids consigned me to the category of party pooper and scaredy cat…me who hopped freight trains and bungee jumped off a New Zealand bridge…admittedly many decades ago.
In postmortem reports, Katherine said, “that was the most crazy and funnest water fight.” Dean wrote that he loved hitting his Grandma Candy with water balloons and wondered why his uncle was barely in the fight. In her panoramic drawing, Caroline excluded me, and depicted Dean yelling, “Attack!” while the kids peppered Grandma and Laurel below a scoreboard that read, “Kids – 9999999, Grown-ups –1.”
Still shamed by insults from these merciless minions, I’m plotting my revenge. At age seventy-nine I’m no longer steady on my feet and quick of reflex, and the three youngest kids will soon turn twelve and can literally run rings around me. So, I’m counting on an old man’s guile. I don’t want to give away the precise details of my battle plan, but I can say it involves sitting the four of them down on Candy’s downstairs patio for a group photo while I sneak onto the balcony above them. When they shout, “Cheese!” I’ll empty a bucket of cold water on their heads. When they complain, I’ll laugh loudly and taunt, “All’s fair in water fights.”
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Orman Day’s prose and poetry have been published by such journals as Creative Nonfiction, Potomac Review, Third Coast, ZYZZYVA and Portland Review.
© 2025, Orman Day
Halfway Down the Stairs 