My great-uncle Brooks, a most colorful character, had as many stories as he had career ventures. At one time in his life, he found himself the informal caretaker of an elderly gentleman named Eddie Wilkinson, who had become increasingly eccentric in his old age. In the vernacular of the day, Mr. Wilkinson would often be referred to in the third person as “Old Man Eddie,” while when directly addressed he would usually be “Mister Eddie.” The rules were somewhat fluid in this regard.

I’m not sure, but Old Man Eddie may have been the one my father told us about, who put a freshly opened beer by his bed each night, and who drank said beer, warm and flat, the next morning. Anyway, Uncle Brooks came over one morning in the dead of winter to find that Old Man Eddie’s fire had gone out and his little cabin was frosting over. The old man himself was seated on his bed in only his boxer shorts, with a towel wrapped around his head and face.

“Mister Eddie!” exclaimed Uncle Brooks. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

Mister Eddie’s muffled voice emanated from the depths of the towel. “I’m trying to toughen myself,” he replied.

When my cousins and sisters and I were kids, we undertook various rituals for toughening ourselves. One yearly event was in early summer when we started to go barefoot. Our front yard was a grove of huge beech trees, which dropped millions of beech nuts, each contained in a sharp little shell. Our ritual was to run as fast as possible across the entire grove without faltering. When swimming in the pond, we would enter the frigid water by what we called “the torture method,” that is, one inch at a time, all the while keeping our eyes peeled for water moccasins and snapping turtles. And from time to time, we may or may not have played a game called “Kick in the Stomach,” that involved one person on the swing and the other in the line of fire.

I suppose too that our myriad sufferings in the name of camping out made us tough as well: mosquitos, rock hard ground with roots and rocks jutting into our skinny little bodies, the unnerving sounds of screech owls and barking foxes, the forest noises that were probably ghosts (or escaped convicts), and the sudden terror of thunderstorms. Truth be told, Old Man Eddie had nothing on us kids.