Del Mar has punished me on this Friday.

I have phone calls out to two boyhood friends, baseball team mates and high school buddies - Ken Murphy and Harry Hughes. All three of us were in the Marine Corps but in different outfits during Vietnam (Murph was with 7th Marines, Harry with 5th Marines, I was with 27th Marines).

Both told me they couldn't couldn't come to my house to shoot me. They were both trying to get up the nerve to shoot themselves after what happened at Saratoga.

Murphy is the best. Ken is 5-foot 8 maybe and his father was our garbageman 50 years ago in Hempstead, NY. Barney Murphy had more red hair than a an Irish painting and drank more Ballantine beer than the brewery could put out.

One time Barney's garbage truck came through our block and stopped our ball game. I popped off "Forty bucks a week and all you can eat!"

Unbeknownst to me my mother was walking the dog, Frog, from behind me and I never saw her.

I had to go home then and my mother beat the hell out of me. As a Depression girl out of 1918 who was thrilled to make 15 cents an hour as a short-order cook and soda jerk at a Times Square Woolworth's while going to high school on West 18th Street in the mid-1930s she was furious.

That evening I was dragged over to Botsford Street and my mother knocked on Mr. Murphy's door. I apologized profusely.

When my mother got done bouncing me off the living room walls earlier that day she told me that if I ever made fun of somebody again making an honest day's wages from hard work that she would beat me to death and go to the electric chair as a happy woman.

Those 1918 girls were some tough stuff but I remember and love my mother the best as a young man just out of service and pacing around our Woodside, Queens apartment sober and sane at 4 in the morning. My mother would spring out of bed and tell me she had ham 'n eggs and coffee coming and booze, beer, or cigarettes if I needed them.

The old man, who was shot to pieces in Italy with the 34th Infantry Division in WWII, used to roll over in bed and say something like, "Don't shoot him, Barbara, he'll get over it" or "Leave him alone, the silly bastard is out on patrol" or "Larry's just thinking about the double at Aqueduct, he'll be OK." Lord, how I loved those two.

Unless you had parents from the 19-teens or thereabouts you might not understand. Jeez, I'm still catching laughs from my parents and some 19th century relatives that I never knew.