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What is up with this thing?
See that little circled drop down box labeled “Comment As?”
Whenever I click it, nothing happens. Nada. Zilch. Zero.
I’ve tried to play with my Firefox settings, and it just ain’t happening. On Internet Explorer, it works fine, but I took a solemn vow to never use Internet Explorer unless Bill Gates is holding a gun to my head. So whenever you have that little widget on your blog, I can’t leave comments.
And that just ticks me right the hell off.
… minding my own business, sitting on my front porch, enjoying a wholesome glass of milk and reading the Bible, when all of a sudden and for no reason… Sumcracka called me nigga.”
Thus summarizes the legal defense of the infamous Jena Six, accused of beating a white student for uttering a racial slur.
The case brought unwanted national media attention to the sleepy little town of Jena, spurred on by professional race baiters and hate mongerers civil rights advocates Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
And as it turns out, not only has Sumcracka proven to be as elusive a culprit as his cousin Sumdood, he had a solid alibi in the beating of Justin Barker. Turns out, he wasn’t even there:
At the hearing, attorneys representing the five men read a statement expressing sympathy to the Barkers and acknowledging that Justin Barker did not use a racial slur. They also apologized to the residents of Jena for the uproar caused by the case.
I’m from the South, where the concept of “fighting words” is not only well-recognized, but has been codified by a number of courts. People are responsible for the words that flow from their mouths, and sometimes those words will earn you a well-deserved beating.
But as it turns out, the slur was never uttered. What these young men probably don’t realize is that not only did their accusation nearly tear a town apart for over two years, but their admission that it was all a lie will only make it easier for those who would deny that racism still exists down here.
Not only didn’t they help themselves, their race or their community, they gave the bigots ammunition to say, “See, I told you so!”
Oddly enough, the professional bigots civil rights advocates Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have been noticeably silent on the subject.
Gee, I wonder why that is?
H/T to Wyatt Earp and CNN.
Nor does it have lifeguards, or cushions, or airbags, and it is peopled with millions of inhabitants who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about your bruised feelings.
In other words, it’s Darwinian.
But some people haven’t quite grasped that. Case in point:
…and i’m loving the negative feedback on the comments i leave on the blogs of heartless people mocking the death of michael jackson. keep it coming people =]
This comes from a young commenter and fledgling blogger. I’ll not link it directly, lest her internet spanking come much too early in her career.
But I will offer some advice: Don’t bait people this way, young lady. You will almost surely invite far worse than you were prepared for.
There’s a word for what you’re doing. It’s called trolling when someone pollutes another person’s forum with negative and disrespectful comments. And let me tell you, people despise trolls.
And when they retaliate, they’re not going be sensitive to your feelings or to the fact that you’re only eighteen. They’re going to get nasty, and I fear that in your naievete, you have no real concept of what nasty really is.
But you will, if you continue along this path.
So go cue up Thriller on your iPod, surf YouTube for some Michael Jackson videos, and learn to work and play well with your neighbors in this big sandbox we call the blogosphere.
Consider that your free lesson in Netiquette from the Ambulance Driver.
One of them was a feminine, surgically enhanced eccentric known for well-choreographed karate moves and an obsession with personal beauty that was unseemly in a person that age.
The other one was Farrah Fawcett.
I feel a little sad about Farrah, though. I used to have her poster pinned to the ceiling directly over my bed. My mother, bless her soul, was wise enough not to ask why I chose that particular spot.
Now that she’s gone, I almost feel like I did when the other object of my desire passed away.
1. Most birds are far more agile than a paramedic on a 500 pound V-twin cruiser. Most birds, that is.
2. A mourning dove at 75 mph will bounce off your helmet with nothing more than a loud thonk.
3. A crow hitting your chest at the same speed, however… well, that’ll leave a bruise.
I’ve had plenty of experience at getting bloodstains out of uniforms before, but this morning was the first time it was ever avian blood…
Yes, another gun post. Oh, but this one is different. There will be no range report. No random gun porn. No showing off my latest acquisition from the gun store. No bragging photos of my tightest groups. I won’t be sharing the latest exploits of me and Husband In Law.
No, this gun post is much more than that. It’s a story about rites of passage, about bonds shared and broken, of memories both fond and painful, memories that shaped me into the man I would become just as surely as the first time I ever did CPR on someone.
It’s a story of small towns and dirt roads, and growing up in the rural south. It’s a tale of dusty hay fields of a sweltering September afternoon, and of January dawns in rice fields so cold the ice encases every clod of gumbo mud dislodged from your boots, sparkling in the waxing light like a trail of geodes strewn behind you. It’s a story of a father and a son, and the gulf that divided them.
And the gun that bridged it.
**********
Like all good stories, this one doesn’t begin in the present day. This one began in 1898, when an itinerant firearms designer from Ogden, Utah went shopping around his latest creation to the big manufacturers of the day. It was a groundbreaking design, this latest creation; an autoloading shotgun operating on the long recoil design, in which the barrel and bolt recoil together en bloc to eject the spent shell and load another from the magazine.
I could wax eloquent about the impact of Browning’s genius on modern firearms design, or list the various iconic American guns to his credit. I could give you a voluminous laundry list of modern weapons that trace their lineage back to an idea that flowed from his fertile mind, thenceforth to a pen and finally onto paper, now yellowed with age and the ink fading, sitting in a dusty archive in Ogden or Liege.
I could point out to you the inherent beauty in his elegantly simple designs. In an industry where many firearms are the mechanical equivalent of a Faulkner novel, John Moses Browning was a Hemingway; master of the short, declarative sentence, writ eloquently nonetheless in his preferred medium of wood and steel.
I could do that, but so many other bloggers already do it better, and with greater scholarship. And ultimately, it would only be appreciated by the engineers and the gun enthusiasts.
No, this is the story of just one gun. One, among untold thousands of such guns, identical in appearance to all its brethren and unique only in terms of the serial number stamped on the bottom of its receiver…
… and perhaps in the memories embedded in every little ding in the stock and worn spot in the bluing. Those dings and scratches are what makes the gun special.
We are all shaped by our fears and prejudices. For some, guns embody everything in our society that there is to fear. For a great many others, the opposite is true. But in the end, it all boils down to individual perspectives, and the memories and experiences that shape them.
**********
Tom Brokaw called them the Greatest Generation, the men and women of my father’s age. They were shaped and annealed by the privations of the Great Depression, and tempered by the fires of World War II. They were stoic, and hardworking, yet imbued with a boundless enthusiasm.
They liberated Europe for the citizens who couldn’t, then rebuilt it for those who wouldn’t, and fulfilled the promise of America only to turn it over to a generation who didn’t.
Theirs wasn’t the callow naivete of their children and grandchildren, borne of indulgence and freedom from hardship. No, theirs was in spite of it.
And they literally saved the world.
My father and uncles were of that generation. My grandfather was a railroad engineer, and the Depression hit the railroad industry especially hard. Work was scarce, and cash money almost nonexistent. To say they were poor would be an understatement, and I fear a description of the times would be lost on today’s youth who think privation means not getting a Wii for Christmas, and only having one plasma television.
In the rural south during the Great Depression, you raised your own food. If you didn’t have the acreage to do that, you took to the rivers and woods to feed your family. As an elder son, the job of hunting fell to my Dad.
On those occasions, Grandaddy sent him afield with a shotgun and four shells, with the expectation that he come back with something for each shell fired. Not only that, with a set of parents, three brothers and a sister to feed, he’d better shoot something big.
“Shells cost money,” Dad would explain with a wink, “and money was hard to come by. So before you shot that rabbit, you had to run alongside him and feel his ribs to see if he was fat enough to feed everybody.”
And the gun he used was the zenith of shotgun design of its day; the Browning Sweet Sixteen. Grandaddy bought it back in better days, when money wasn’t as scarce. It was the shotgun every country boy wanted to own. Sure, you might pay a little more for them up front, but you only bought them once. They shot better than you were capable, and they rarely broke. If you could only afford one gun to do it all, chances were you owned a shotgun. And if you had the means, that shotgun was a Browning Sweet Sixteen.
It could scratch a squirrel from the top of a tall oak or pluck a rising greenhead from the sky, or roll a zigzagging cottontail trying to stay ahead of your beagles. Change loads and the friction rings, and it could fell a deer or defend your home and property. And in an era when missing meant going hungry, Dad and my uncles became adept enough to stay well fed.
As men, during B17 bombing runs over Germany, that wingshooting prowess kept Dad and my uncle Jerry alive. Luftwaffe fighters took the place of quail and ducks, and the Browning .50 caliber machine gun stood in for the old Sweet Sixteen, but the techniques were the same, and the purpose no less serious.
Daddy made it through the war, and came back home to his job as a Harley Davidson mechanic. He borrowed that Sweet Sixteen for another eight years, time-sharing it with his brothers, lusting all the while for one of his own.
He still didn’t have his own shotgun, and borrowing Grandaddy’s didn’t count. A man paid his own way, you see, and a good craftsman supplied his own tools.
Radio was still king of media in those days, and television was still a rarity in Monroe. But when KNOE went on air as the first television station in northeast Louisiana in 1953, Dad and Uncle Jerry smelled opportunity, and opened their own radio and television repair service.
And as a present to himself to celebrate the opening of his own business, Dad bought a Browning shotgun of his own.
**********
Its official name was the Browning Auto 5, but in t
he south in the first half of this century they were known simply as “Belgium Brownings.”
Belgium, not Belgian, as if in grudging acknowledgement of the fact that they were manufactured overseas, but they were most definitely not of that place. They were American guns. Where I grew up, if you were gonna own a foreign-designed gun, the only honorable way to procure one was to pluck it off the body of the German or Jap that you had killed in battle with your, well… American gun. Southerners are rather funny that way.
The A5 wasn’t the only Browning design manufactured by Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre, but mention the name to a country boy, and it will instantly conjure an image of that distinctive humpbacked receiver, one as indelible as those conjured by words like 1911 or Peacemaker or Model 12.
The Belgium Brownings were the originals, the icons. They were the elder sons of the Browning line, and were highly prized. Never mind the fact that the ones manufactured later differed only in minor cosmetic details. The Belgium Brownings came first, and as such they were accorded a higher status. Southerners are funny that way as well.
The one my father owned rolled off the assembly line in Liege in 1953. It likely wound its way from there to Antwerp, perhaps even traveling by some of the same trucks and rail cars that carried troops and munitions for the Battle of The Bulge. It left Antwerp in the cargo hold of a ship, wound its way across the Atlantic to a seaport on the east coast, and from there down many a rural highway and pig trail until it was unboxed and placed on the sales rack by one Gene Lutz, proprietor of Gene’s Sporting Goods of Monroe, Louisiana.
It was destined to see a lot of use over the next fifteen years.
**********
Dad and I didn’t get along. Even when I was a small child, there was always… something unspoken between us, a gap between the son I was supposed to be and the father I wanted. Neither of us met the other’s expectations.
Dad worked long hours at his TV repair business, coming home well after dark each day, and leaving for work well before we got up for school. He was ill-tempered, and he complained a lot. He also loved my sisters more than me.
Or at least, that’s the way it seemed when I was a child. My twin sister Kim and my older sister Darlene were obviously his favorites. And just as obviously, my brother Terry and my oldest sister Sheri were not. His ambivalence towards Sheri and Terry was easy to figure out; they were another man’s kids. They were the baggage my Mom carried from two previous failed marriages.
How then, to explain me? I was treated like a stepchild, yet I was his own flesh and blood. Or so I thought.
I was a grown man before the truth was revealed to me, before I had an explanation as to why Dad looked at me the way he did for so many years. I was a living reminder of another man, and my mother’s infidelity. I acted nothing like him, looked nothing like him, and in the back of his mind, Dad feared that I would never be anything like him.
Still, he managed to reconcile his doubts with the responsibilities of a father. He was the best father he knew how to be, even as his emotions warred with his sense of duty to his family. And I have no doubt he loved us all, whether we be stepchildren, biological children, or the two of us still in doubt. If sometimes the spanking were a little harder than they should have been, or the words a littler harsher than they needed to be, then the sobs afterward were fiercer, and the hugs he gave more fervent, and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood why.
He wasn’t just trying to remind me how much he loved me. He was reminding himself, too.
I was still a toddler when I learned to read. Before I started kindergarten, I had read every volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and thirsted for more. Dad laughingly called me his little bookworm, and probably wondered all the while why I wasn’t outside playing and collecting scabs and skeeter bites like a normal little boy.
Still, he fed my habit, and when I had tired of reading the encyclopedia for the umpteeth time, he introduced me to Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. I read everything he gave me, and when I had devoured one novel, I’d come back to him and ask for another. And he’d sigh and smile bemusedly, and open the bottom drawer of his bedside table, and fish another book from its mysterious depths. And sometimes, as a secret just between us men, we’d share a handful of Planter’s peanuts from the jar he kept there.
It was somewhere around that time that he introduced me to other books he kept in the bottom of his sock drawer, high and out of my reach. In it, he kept a couple of weighty, dusty old tomes with brittle pages and dozens of black-and-white and sepia-toned photographs. One was a chronicle of his bomb group in World War II, and the other was an illustrated history of Browning firearms.
We’d lie there on his bed and slowly, reverently flip through the pages as he told me stories of his childhood, and the war, and of hunting trips long past.
He’d point out photos of friends he’d known in the war. Whether they were friends made of flesh and blood, or those with four lumbering radial engines and aluminum skin, Dad spoke of them both with the same fondness. I’d marvel at pictures of those old B17s, some of them with huge chunks of airplane missing, that somehow still made it home to their base in Pisa.
I’d ask him, “What made those holes in those planes, Daddy?” and he’d pause for a moment before he’d answer.
“Flak, usually. Sometimes German fighters.”
“Did your plane ever get hit by flak, Daddy?”
“Not as bad as the ones in these pictures,” he’d allow.
“Did you shoot down any German fighters, Daddy?”
“I shot at some, Son. I’m pretty sure I hit ‘em. Never saw any of ‘em go down. Your Uncle Jerry now, he shot down a few. He was a ball turret gunner.”
“How come he shot down more planes than you, Daddy?”
“Didn’t say he shot down more than me, Son. I’m just saying I never saw any of the ones I shot at go down. Your Uncle Jerry’s position was on the bottom of the airplane. He could see a lot more than I could. I had to work the radios, too.
“Is Uncle Jerry a better shot than you, Daddy?”
“Well, he is if you hear him tell it,” Dad would chuckle. “But we both learned from your Grandaddy, shooting the same gun. I figure I was always the better shot.”
“Were you scared, Daddy?”
“Sometimes,” he’d answer quietly, “but me and your uncles did real well at aerial gunnery practice. They’d drive us around, shooting skeet with shotguns from the backs of moving pickup trucks. We were a lot better at it than the boys who had never picked up a gun before. Reckon it saved our lives a time or two. We even used the same kind of shotgun we grew up shooting.”
“What kind of shotgun is that, Daddy?”
“A Belgium Bro
wning, Son. Your Grandaddy had a sixteen gauge, but I bought a twelve instead. You wanna see it?”
And so went the first time I ever held my Daddy’s gun. It was a scene repeated many hundreds of times over my childhood. He never tired of telling the stories, and I never tired of hearing them.
It wasn’t long before that illustrated history of Browning firearms found itself a place under my bed. When Dad was working, I’d haul it out and reverently memorize everything I could. I read all about the 1911 Colt, and the Winchester ‘94, and the BAR, and the machine guns he invented, and a dozen other guns that book taught me how to field strip, even though I had laid my hands on but one. And my attention kept coming back to that gun, the Belgium Browning autoloading shotgun.
The one my Daddy owned.
**********
I was five when I got my first BB gun, a Daisy Cub. Mom thought it was a toy when she bought it, but Dad knew better. And so, when I unwrapped Mom’s present Christmas morning, there was also a carton of BBs from Dad under the tree.
He taught me the rules of safe gun handling, and taught me to shoot it well. When I got older, I graduated to a Benjamin .22 pellet rifle, and then the Winchester Model 74 .22 he owned.
When he thought I was ready, I was allowed, under his watchful eye, to shoot his Smith and Wesson M&P .38 Special and the Hi Standard .22 target pistol.
Some of you may question Dad’s wisdom, allowing his son to handle guns at so young an age. Dad recognized the budding gun nut in me, and he readily encouraged my interest. Some may consider that irresponsible.
But we had so little in common, Dad and I. If it weren’t for guns and hunting, we’d have never talked at all. In another place, with other people, it might have been learning the proper ignition timing on a big block Chevy, or how to run a table saw and lathe. With us, it was guns and hunting, and our love for both.
With a thousand life lessons sandwiched in between.
**********
“Riflery is a science,” Dad would tell me, “and pistol shooting is an art. But shotgunning now… that’s a little of both.”
He went on to say that, unlike a rifle or a pistol, a shotgun has no rear sight. The rear sight is the gunner’s eye, and in order to hit consistently, that eye has to be in the same place, every single time. And to accomplish that, a gunner had to practice their form until it came as naturally as breathing. The shotgun was an extension of your body, an appendage you control with a thought, just as easily as pointing your finger.
And so, he removed the rear sight of my Benjamin pellet gun, and I’d practice mounting it, over and over, every day when he came home from work.
“Keep your head up,” he’d chide. “A shotgunner keeps his head up, always. The stock comes to your cheek, not your cheek to the stock. Keep your head up, and your eyes focused on the target.”
“And when do I actually get to shoot something?” I’d complain. “This is boring.”
“Patience,” he’d tell me. “Before you know it, you’ll be shooting that Belgium Browning. Did I ever tell you about the time I shot the crown out of my uncle’s hat with it? We’d been skunked all day, and Uncle Les was grumbling, and he said ‘Hell boy, if anything had flown within range, you prob’ly couldna hit it with that damned thing anyway,’ and my buddy Bill Hartley just smiled and dared him, “Why Les, if you think that’s true, why dontcha just throw your hat in the air?” and when he did…”
And then Dad would dissolve into a knee-slapping fit of laughter, tears running from his eyes as he recalled his Uncle Les mournfully picking up the remains of his fedora, nothing left of it but the band and the brim.
“Keep both eyes open,” he’d instruct. “Always shoot with both eyes open. When you close one eye, you lose depth perception. You can’t judge speed or distance without depth perception. Bill Hartley used to shoot with one eye closed. Did I ever tell you about the time he got hit in the face with a dead mallard hen one morning?”
And I’d smile and shake my head, even though I’d heard the story a hundred times by then. Bill Hartley aimed his shotgun just like a rifle, with one eye closed. And so, when he shot at a dark blur passing overhead one morning shortly before sunrise, he continued to track the approaching duck, unaware until it was too late how close it was. And when he raised his head, the duck struck him squarely in the face, breaking his nose. I loved hearing those Bill Hartley stories. He was Dad’s lifelong hunting buddy, dead of cancer several years before I was born.
And I’d dream that, one day, I’d go hunting with Dad, too. He’d bring his Belgium Browning, and I’d carry… well, whatever shotgun I’d own one day, and maybe he’d even let me shoot the Browning, and we’d have new stories to tell.
And so the coaching went, and the stories. It wasn’t long before I could mount that Benjamin and nail a can lying in the grass, as quick as thought. Once I could do that, he’d throw targets in the air, progressively smaller as my skill grew, until I could hit a Ping Pong ball nine times out of ten.
When I was twelve, I got a shotgun of my own, a youth model 20 gauge single shot. Never was I so proud as that Christmas morning in 1980. Dad showed me how to break it down and clean it, and while I did, he cleaned his Browning, too.
“Your Grandaddy’s Sweet Sixteen had a plain barrel with a Cutts compensator on it,” he said, “but I got mine with a hollow matte rib. That was a new thing when I bought mine. It dissipates heat better than a solid rib, gives your eyes a better reference than that plain barrel, too.”
“Better than a ventilated rib, Daddy?” I asked, thinking of all the modern guns I’d seen in my growing collection of gun magazines.
“Probably not,” he acknowledged. “But I think mine looks better, don’t you?”
And so it did, because Daddy said so.
“It’s so heavy,” I exclaimed, trying to hold it up with the spindly arms of a twelve-year-old. “Why didn’t you get a lightweight instead of the standard?”
“It won’t be heavy when you’re old enough to shoot it,” he chuckled. “And the weight might make it harder to point, but it also makes it easier to swing.”
He set up an old trap thrower behind the house, and turned me loose with a few boxes of shotgun shells and a case of clay pigeons. When he saw that I could break a going-away target with ease, he moved the thrower.
“Try to hit a crossing target now,” he instructed. “You have to lead it a little bit. Put the bead of your gun out in front of the bird.”
“How far?” I wanted to know.
“Depends on how fast the bird is traveling, and how fast you swing,” he answered. “That part you have to figure out for yourself.”
And I did, eventually. It took me a while, because I’d lift my head from the stock, seeking the instant gratification of seeing that clay dissolve into a cloud of dust. And I’d miss every time.
“You’re stopping your swing,” he pointed out. “You have to keep your head on the stock and follow through. If you don’t learn to follow through, you’ll never learn to hit anything.”
I was a grown man before I recognized that for the metaphor it was.
**********
My teenage years with Dad held far less pleasant memories for us both. We fought constantly, and many a screaming match and hurtful word passed between us. And sometimes, there were even blows.
Yet for all the anger between us, ther
e was always a détente in effect while we were hunting or shooting, an armistice agreement whenever we met on the neutral ground of the woods.
You know, kinda like in Highlander, when it was forbidden to fight on Holy Ground, except that our church was a cathedral of flooded pin oaks, or the quiet chapel of a deer stand overlooking a pre-dawn clearcut. On those days, we were Father and Son once again.
I still remember the first duck hunting trip with Dad, slogging for what seemed like miles through frigid water, carefully feeling for solid footing amid the submerged snags and roots. My twelve-year-old legs were rubbery by the time Dad and Terry finally threw out the decoys.
I stood there huddled against the base of a massive pin oak, numb hands nervously gripping the stock of my shotgun. Dad had bundled me up like a mummy, and yet I was still so very, very cold. Yet I kept my misery to myself, because to admit I was freezing would be admitting that I wasn’t ready to hunt with the men. And I so wanted to be one of the men.
So I stood there and suffered, shifting my weight from one leg to the other in a vain attempt to maintain some circulation in my wooden feet. Dad and Terry called and shot at ducks I couldn’t even see until they magically splashed down, seemingly from thin air.
I never even put my gun to my shoulder. And on the way out of the woods, I tripped on a root and plunged headlong into the icy water. Without a second thought, Dad dropped his precious Browning and hauled me spluttering to my feet. Holding me cradled to his chest, he knelt down and fished his gun off the bottom, handed it to Terry, and carried me the rest of the way out of the woods.
When he got me to the truck, he stripped my wet clothes off and turned the heater vents on me, rubbing my numb and frostbitten fingers and toes. And he held me there, warm under his coat, all the way home.
There were many more hunting trips to come, and none as miserable as that first hunting duck hunting trip in the flooded timber. Along the way, I graduated to Dad’s side-by-side double, and finally, when I was sixteen, to the Browning.
I carried it a lot over the years to come, even after I had bought other guns of my own. And in the honest dings and scratches it accumulated along the way, I added my stories to the gun’s lore.
Sitting on a narrow ridge overlooking a late November creek bottom, I could swear my sweaty hands left grooves where they gripped the stock, waiting for that rut-crazed buck that would surely be checking his scrapes there. Any minute now.
The finish was already darker there around the grip, the sweat of nervous hands adding a patina all their own. In 1971, some of that sweat had been added by Sonny, the man who swept the floors at Dad’s shop. Monroe had thankfully been spared most of the violence and racial strife of the Civil Rights movement, but looting in the black section of town wasn’t exactly a police priority during the Great Flood of ‘71. They figured they had better things to do than keep a bunch of niggers from robbing each other blind.
And so Dad loaned the Browning to Sonny, to defend his family and property should the need arise. It wasn’t a very popular decision, arming a black man in the South back then, but Dad knew it was the right thing to do.
There is a small dent in the rib, about six inches from the muzzle. I put it there one morning in 1984, swinging on a running rabbit. The sapling to my right stopped my swing, but I’m happy to say I rolled the rabbit anyway.
That dent has a twin on the left side, about a foot farther back. It was there long before I was born, the result of a similar mistake made by my brother Terry.
There is a ding in the stock on the left side where Dad banged it against the side of the boat in 1955. Normally Dad was a very careful gun handler, but when an eight-foot alligator discovers, too late, that the narrow boat run does not allow him sufficient room to slide off the bank and under the boat, you will use whatever you have handy to help him get his head pointed in the right direction.
Even if it means using the butt of your brand-new shotgun.
Near the butt, the wood is a bit swollen, as stocks tend to do when exposed to too much moisture. Like, say, dropping it in the water to rescue your floundering son.
There’s a dark spot directly over a dent in the other side of the stock. If you look closely, you may recognize that it looks just like the tip of an iron. I forget how the dent got there, but I well remember the embarrassment of trying to steam a dent out of the stock and leaving a burn instead.
The scratches in the bluing near the muzzle were gained on our last hunting trip, over ten years ago. Dad was pushing eighty by then, and Parkinson’s disease had slowed his movements and softened his speech to a whisper. But when he concentrated, he could still hold the muzzle steady, and I wanted so very badly to get him a deer.
And so, deep into the rut in the year Mom died, I arranged to pick Dad up early one morning and spend a day hunting a friend’s lease. When I got to the house, I found him waiting patiently in the kitchen, sipping coffee and filling his handwarmers with lighter fluid.
We ate breakfast at Ray’s PeGe, just like we did when I was a kid, only this time I picked up the tab. And when we got to Mike’s lease, I walked Dad to his stand and got him settled in.
“The feeder’s just down at the end of that shooting lane, Dad,” I said, pointing out front. “Most times they’ll come out of the woods behind you, and cross the clearing just to your left. All the mast has been eaten by now, so they should head straight to the feeder.”
“Got it,” he whispered, then asked in a tremulous voice, “Are you going to be close by?”
I bit my lower lip, remembering long ago trips when I’d fearfully asked him that very thing. I gave him the same answer he always gave me. “Close enough to hear you shoot, Dad,” I reassured him. “If I hear you touch one off, I’ll be here in five minutes. If not, I’ll be back by noon.”
“See you then,” he whispered. “Good luck.”
I didn’t see anything at all that morning, but that didn’t matter to me. I’d only see deer if they made it past Dad, and his stand was the most productive one on the lease. It was the closest thing to a sure thing there is in hunting.
By 11:45, I still hadn’t heard him shoot, and reluctantly I packed my gear. By noon, I was approaching Dad’s stand from behind. Fresh tracks led from behind the stand, right down the shooting lane I had told Dad to watch. When I started to climb the ladder to his stand and it still didn’t bring a reaction, I felt my heart quicken a little in fear.
I found him there, sleeping peacefully, the Browning propped up in the corner.
“Time to go, Dad,” I whispered, shaking him gently. “Let’s go grab some lunch.”
“Musta closed my eyes for a little bit,” he whispered apologetically. “Didn’t see a thing all morning.”
“Yeah well, that’s why they call it hunting and not shooting, right?” I winked. “Isn’t that what you always told me?” I saw no reason to mention the fresh tracks.
I backed down the ladder and Dad handed down the Browning to me before climbing down himself. He was agonizingly slow, and I fought the urge to help him. To do so would have wounded his pride terribly.
Five yards from the truck, he stumbled and went down, plugging the barrel of his Browning with mud when he fell. He skinned both his knees and slipped all the hide off the palm of his left hand.
Without a second thought, I set my rifle down and scrambled to help him to his feet. I could tell he was deeply embarassed and in terrible pain, but predictably he was more worried about the Browning than his own injuries.
“Shit, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig, Dad,” I blurted. ”
Let me get those scrapes cleaned up and we’ll get you to the hospital.”
“First unload my gun and unplug the barrel,” he insisted. “There’s nothing wrong with me more than wounded pride.” The pallor of his skin and his pinched expression belied the words, but he would brook no arguments.
And so I unloaded the gun, and used a cleaning rod to push the mud out of the barrel, and hastily wiped it down before stowing it in its case. Only then would Dad allow me to pick the mud, twigs and gravel from his cuts and irrigate them with saline. He sat stoically through it all, but the sweat popped out on his forehead when I gently scrubbed at his palm before folding the skin back into place and wrapping it with gauze.
“No hospital,” he ordered. “Just take me home.”
We spent half the trip in silence, with me tearing my eyes from the road occasionally to steal pensive glances at him, noticing for the first time how feeble he had become. He was old and stooped, and gray, and I knew then that we had just taken our last hunting trip together.
“Tell me about Bill Hartley and the water moccasin, Dad,” I begged, eager for anything to break the silence.
“Well,” he chuckled, lying with his head against the seat back, eyes closed, “we were gigging frogs one night, and this water moccasin swam by. Now Uncle Les had always told us that if you were quick enough, you could grab a snake by the tail and crack him like a whip, and his head would come right off. So Bill says, ‘watch this, Norman,’ and he reaches out and grabs that snake by the tail…”
He retold every old hunting tale I ever heard, and we chuckled all the way to Dad’s house. I helped him out of the truck, tucked him into bed, and made him take a couple ibuprofen before I left. I called a doctor friend, and had him phone in a prescription for an antibiotic, just in case.
And then I cried all the way home.
**********
There are days when I don’t think about him at all, and then there are days when all I can think about are those hunting trips together. All the anger and bitterness between us had faded by the time I was a grown man, but the memories of those hunting trips remain as vivid as a rising greenhead silhouetted against the morning sun.
And when those memories come flooding back, I take Dad’s Browning out and lovingly clean it, just like I did last week. It was John M. Browning’s greatest creation, in more ways than one, and it will remain in my family until I’m gone.
Yesterday was Father’s Day, and I took your Browning out and shot it again, Dad.
And you’ll be happy to know, I remembered to follow through.
The ex and I pretty much agree on everything when it comes to KatyBeth. In fact, the only thing we’ve ever disagreed on is the subject of pierced ears.
KatyBeth was less than a year old when Ex Missus and her mother announced that they wanted to get Katy’s ears pierced.
I pitched a fit. Not that I’m against piercings and body jewelry, but I am when the wearer is still in diapers.
“Not a chance in Hell,” I vowed.
They were genuinely taken aback at my vehemence. “Why not?” they asked, surprised. “It’ll be cute!”
“My daughter is already cute,” I answered, “and I’m not going to allow her to be mutilated for someone else’s idea of aesthetics.”
They didn’t care for my use of the word mutilation, but in my mind that’s exactly what it was. And they knew better than to broach the subject again. It was one of the few times I felt it necessary to show my ass to my wife and MIL.
A couple of times since then, Katy has approached me about piercing her ears, an idea obviously planted by Grandma and not something Katy wanted herself. I told her to go back to Mawmaw’s house and tell her, “Daddy said NO WAY.”
I told the Ex that I’d let Katy get a piercing under the following conditions:
1. Only one pair of holes, in an earlobe only. If she wants a second set, she has to wait until she’s in high school.
2. No noses, eyebrows, tongues, or navels, ever. Is she wants to pierce anything besides her ears, wait until she’s 18 and out of my house. And if she ever decides to pierce any part of her hoo ha, she’d better wait until I’m dead and in the ground before sharing that little tidbit.
3. Where tattoos are concerned, see #2. No butterflies, flowers, cartoon characters, barbed wire, Chinese symbols or tramp stamps until she’s at least 18.
4. When she wants her ears pierced, she’ll have to ask me, and convince me it was her idea.
*sigh*
That day came today.
Hopefully I’ll be dead before she decides to decorate her coochie like a Christmas tree.
… and personally, I think he should get it.
Paramedic Maurice White could have done a better job at de-escalating the situation.
But that wasn’t his job. That role should have fallen to either Trooper Daniel Martin, or the other troopers who arrived as backup.
And in that role, they failed. Epically.
It doesn’t matter what Maurice White did, or that Martin thought his partner flipped him off. I’ve lost count of the times the cops have flipped me the bird, and how many times I’ve returned the salute. And with 99% of the cops I know, if they ever thought the gesture was something other than good-natured ribbing, they’d either have a word with me once I got to the hospital, or take it up with my supervisor.
You know, like professionals do. They’d never pull me over on the highway, patient loaded, and engage in a pissing contest with me over some perceived slight.
The dash-cam video shows clearly that the ambulance did indeed yield the right-of-way, when it was safe and prudent to do so. It also shows that, for the most part, Maurice White was the voice of reason, and Trooper Martin the raving lunatic.
The man may be a stellar cop who had a bad day. I’d like to believe he is. If that were the case, I’d think a short suspension or other departmental discipline, and some counseling would be just what he needs. Get him some help with his issues, and get him back on the highways.
But his actions and his public statements since then prove that the man thinks he did nothing wrong.
And that is even more chilling than watching the video of the man wigging out on a paramedic in front of a dozen witnesses.
Get him off the streets. He’s dangerous.
… I was having tea with royalty.
Neener neener neener.
Long time reader and fellow blogger Strings asked me to spread the word about a couple of websites committed to educating the public about child abuse and exposing the predators that lurk on the web:
I sometimes assume that everyone is as aware of the warning signs of child sexual abuse as those of us in the health care and public safety professions, but the volume of the victimized kids we see and the parents who were unaware of the abuse prove otherwise.
Check out these sites, and get informed.
Allow me to outline the officially sanctioned, AHA-approved steps of layperson CPR:
1. Determine unresponsiveness. In CPR class, this is done by shaking the manikin and saying “Annie, Annie, are you okay?”
In real life, this is done by shaking the sleeping slug of a husbandly unit in question and screeching, “Bob, git yer lazy ass outta bed! Uh… Bob? Bob?! BOB!!!”
2. Activate the emergency response system. This is done by calling 911, or if you’re in the UK, 999.*
3. Look, listen and feel for breathing, and look for signs of circulation. This is done by putting your ear to the victim’s mouth, listening for airflow and feeling for said airflow on the cheek.
Simultaneously, one looks toward the feet, observing for chest rise and signs of circulation, such as coughing or spontaneous movement.
Or, in the case of Bob the late sleeper, morning wood.
4. If no breathing or spontaneous movement, forcefully rip open his pajama top and apply the heel of one hand to his breast bone, right between the nipples. Place the heel of your other hand on top, and rhythmically compress the chest, approximately two inches deep, at a rate of 100 compressions per minute. Softly humming Staying Alive to yourself while doing this greatly aids in maintaining the proper rate and rhythm.
5. Continue Step 4 until help arrives.
Granted, this method of determining lifelessness is somewhat crude, and mistakes do occur. These mistakes are easily rectified by stopping chest compressions if the patient tries to push your hands away while grunting, “Je-sus-Christ-what-are-you-do-ing-you-are-kill-ing-me…”
If Bob is stiff, excluding the aforementioned morning wood, don’t even bother. He is too far gone to resuscitate.
If morning wood is the only stiffness present, might I suggest that there are quicker, more pleasant ways of awakening Bob and getting him out of bed? And in a damned fine mood, no less!
*You will note that Step 2 does not include the instructions, “Boot up computer. Log onto internet. Open Google in your web browser…”
KatyBeth: “Dad, we need to discuss something.”
AD: “What’s that, Scooterpoot?”
KatyBeth: “Well, we need to decide what our plans are for this weekend!”
AD: “And what would you like to do this weekend?”
KatyBeth: “Well, Sunday is Father’s Day, so I think we should go out to see a movie.”
AD: “Since it’s Father’s Day, I get to pick the movie, right?”
KatyBeth (smiling winningly): “Of course! As long as it’s not a scary movie. Or loud. And it has to be a cartoon. Or we could go see Hannah Montana again.”
AD (sighing): “You really want to go see Up, don’t you!”
KatyBeth: “That’s perfect, Daddy! Good choice!”
And no doubt, afterward, she will treat me to the dinner of my choice. As long as it’s pizza. Or some place that serves chicken nuggets. And I get to pay for it.
Still, oughta be a good Father’s Day.
Might I suggest that if you perceive me as arrogant, it is merely because I am mirroring the arrogance you project:
ER Doc: “So did I hear the nurse say you gave her Nitro? Why Nitro?”
AD: “Well, I’m not absolutely sure it isn’t her emphysema acting up, and I’ve already given her a neb treatment. But she’s hypertensive, she’s got wheezes and rales, jugular venous distension, exaggerated air hunger, +3 pedal edema, and she complains that she’s hot. Smelled a bit like a CHFer to me.”
ER Doc (with an air of exaggerated patience): “Still doesn’t explain why you gave Nitro to a CHFer.”
AD: “That’s one of the primary treatments for hypertensive CHF exacerbation or acute pulmonary edema; vasodilatation with Nitro and CPAP.”
ER Doc (openly arrogant now, in full view of half a dozen witnesses and my patient): “That’s just wrong. Nitro will make her worse.”
AD (stunned that he’d say such a thing): “…!…”
ER Doc (again, in public): “You shouldn’t have given her Nitro.”
AD (tired of playing the “politely deferential” game): “I’m not going to debate you, Doc. And this is not the place for this discussion.”
ER Doc: “It’s a good thing you’re not going to debate me. Because I’m the one that went to medical school.”
AD (smiling thinly): “Gee, that’s a coincidence. So did all the people that taught me to use Nitro and CPAP as the first line treatment for acute pulmonary edema. Do you suppose they pulled the idea out of their asses?”
ER Doc (condescendingly): “Perhaps you’re thinking of morphine and Lasix. Those are the preferred treatments for acute CHF exacerbation.”
AD (agreeably): “That would indeed be correct. If this were 1999.“
Did you expect me to just roll over like a lapdog? I appreciate the fact that you went to medical school and all, and that your knowledge base far exceeds mine, but I was already doing this job for five years while you were still popping zits and studying for the MCAT.
And if you’re going to stand there and tell me that reducing preload is not a desirable thing in a hypertensive patient with acute pulmonary edema, you’re simply proving that all your superior medical training still failed to teach you how to think.
And if you dress me down in public again, particularly when you’re wrong, you’re gonna see how well I do condescension.
… and this time it didn’t involve a bottle of Southern Comfort and a Phi Mu coed I met at the Kappa Sigma fraternity rush.*
KatyBeth had a great time. This is her kind of fishing; tie a freezer-burned chicken leg to a 10 foot length of string, pitch said chicken leg it into a couple feet of water, and notify Daddy when the string starts to move out to sea.
One of the catch.
We snapped this one to show the distinctive markings of blue crabs, but it does a better job of demonstrating what happens to idiots who don’t frequently reapply their sunblock, don’t you think?
*Just kidding, folks. Those girls were rich enough they didn’t have crabs. They had lobsters.
There are few things more annoying than conversing with a patient who talks like a combination of Gabby Johnson and Farmer Fran. He even looks like he could be their love child, if such a thing were biologically possible.
Then again, it confounds medical science that he still draws breath, so who am I to say what is or isn’t biologically possible?
It would be easier if he was demented. Then, I could at least noncommittally say “Mmmm hmmm,” every time he rattled off a string of authentic frontier gibberish idle banter.
But noooooo, he’s entirely lucid, if somewhat pickled from years of alcohol abuse, so I have to respond to every single bit of authentic frontier gibberish idle banter he utters, when all the while I just wish he’d. Go. To. Sleep.
Four hours of this, with multiple infusions of vasopressors and antibiotics, and not a damned Diprivan in the bunch.
*sigh*
Picked my bike up today. The turn signals still do not work, but that is mainly because I chose to take my bike home rather than be at their mercy for another month.
In case you came in after the previous Cycles & More post, here’s the final Mastercard ad:
Rear tire and tube replacement: $322.26
Full service tune up: $210.45
Replace mounting hardware for rear passenger footpeg (supplied by owner): $75.60
Replace and install chrome trim cap over left rear shock mount: $22.45
Unmitigated redass and aggravation from two months of waiting for my bike: N/C
Telling the dealership owner why me, Rookie Partner and Dino Medic will all be buying our next bikes and jet skis from his competitor: Priceless.
Well, it wasn’t quite priceless.
Priceless would have been seeing him fawn at my feet to make it right, and then bursting into flames from the sheer heat of my anger and burning into a greasy puddle right there on his showroom floor.
But as I left, I suggested that perhaps he should Google the name of his business and see what pops up.
He may yet spontaneously combust.
And who was Suzanne Flanzimay, you ask?
Well, among thousands of petty crimes, she killed James Taylor’s girlfriend.
Well, at least I thought she did. When I was but a wee tot, my mother lurved Fire and Rain, particularly John Denver’s cover of the song. And being the precocious little fella that I was, I used to sing it to her to cheer her up, and my mom needed a lot of cheering up when I was a kid.
Never mind how such a melancholy song can actually cheer someone up, but I suspect Mom liked hearing a three-year-old hilariously mangle the lyrics:
Just yesterday morning, they wet me know you were gone.
Suzanne Fwanzimay put an end to youuuu…
Suzanne Flanzimay was the surrogate for Notme, Sumbody and Idunno whenever something went wrong at my house:
“Who ate all your father’s salted peanuts?!”
Beats me, but it fits Suzanne Flanzimay’s MO.
“How did this wad of gum get in your sister’s hair?”
I recall seeing Suzanne chewing an entire pack of Wrigley’s not ten minutes ago, Mom.
“Who went into my purse and ate an entire value pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint???”
See previous answer.
“WHICH ONE OF YOU IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THROWING ELEVEN POODLE PUPPIES IN THE TOILET????”
Well, if I had to hazard a guess, I bet Suzanne Flanzimay wanted to give them a bath. Hence, the shampoo bottle and several hairbrushes thrown in there, too. But in her defense, she thought you’d be pleased, Mom.
When I was eleven or so, while learning to play acoustic guitar, I found the lyrics to Fire and Rain. Much to my chagrin, I learned that Suzanne Flanzimay was not the master criminal I thought she was.
Well, you can imagine my disappointment; yet another piece of childhood innocence dashed upon the harsh rocks of reality, lying there beside the bleached wrecks of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the belief that professional wrestling is real.
Flash forward thirty-odd years to present day, and I’m noodling around on the Intarwebz, downloading a song or two. On a lark, I Googled the lyrics to one of them, and discovered that, while the chick Manfred Mann was singing about may have indeed been blinded by the light, she was definitely not “wrapped up like a douche.”
I had hopes that she was, you know, what with little Early Pearly offering rides in his curly-wurly and all the calliopes crashing to the ground. Manfred Mann songs are the lyrical equivalent of Jabberwocky. Personally, I think “wrapped up like a douche” dovetails nicely with the rest of the lyrics, and if you could thow in a frumious Bandersnatch and a few slithy toves gyreing and gimbling in the wabe, well that’d be just peachy, too.
Any of y’all have other tragically misunderstood song lyrics you’d like to share?
Edit: I love you people. I get comments even when I accidentally hit “publish” instead of “save as draft.”
… please explain to me why The Borg has a 24/7 critical care ambulance stationed in the town 90 miles away, when you’re always going to call me to take the transfers out of their hospital?
We make a 180 mile round trip, they make a 180 mile round trip. We’re on the road three hours, they’re on the road three hours. Neither of us will get off late if we take the call. The only difference in doing it your way, as far as I can tell, is that they get an extra three hours of holding the couch in place while we don’t.
Are you saving them for a rainy day, or what? Is there a hidden purpose here? Some nuance of ambulance deployment and logistics I’m unaware of?
Or is it because you’re a monosynaptic, knuckle-dragging, fetid scratch-and-sniff armpit of humanity, a poo-flinging monkey incapable of independent thought?
… and Self Pity is pouring it on, trying to run up the score.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas wasn’t talking about you, but the words still apply. You’re not old. You’re only forty-two. You have another lifetime ahead of you.
Your diabetes can be managed. You can enjoy a fulfilling life in spite of it. People do it every day.
Heart disease can be managed. Take your meds. Exercise. Watch your diet. Stop smoking.
I understand that when your bipolar disorder takes a manic swing, you may think you can beat the world. You even think you can go without your meds. But you can’t, and some part of you knows it.
And your cancer need not be a death sentence. It can be fought, and it can be beaten. It’s frightening, I know, but I’m sitting here, fourteen inches away. I can help. I bridge that distance every day. I can do it with you, if you don’t insist on putting miles of self-pity between us.
But you don’t want my help. You want my pity.
And pity is not in my repertoire.
If you want to fight, you’ll have all the compassion I can muster. I’ll root for you every step of the way. I’ll provide what medical care I can.
But I’m not going to watch you throw the fight. I’ll save my labors for the people who haven’t given up. I’ll save my compassion and empathy for the family you’re torturing with your little pity party. If you want sympathy, you will not find it here. I suggest you look somewhere between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.
You rode in my ambulance, and I asked you gently if you wanted to die, because it certainly looked that way to me. You learned of your cancer two years ago, and never went for a single followup visit. You stopped your heart medications then. You stopped taking your psych meds. You stuck your head in the sand, and hoped your diagnosis was just a bad dream. And now, you’ve stopped taking your insulin because two weeks ago, you found out the cancer had spread.
You sobbed brokenly and insisted that you didn’t want to die. I took you at your word, and I gave you not what you wanted, but what you needed. I told you what your family, paralyzed by their grief, would not. Pardon me if my words were less than gentle.
It’s still not too late for you. It’s time you sucked it up and started swinging back. Start fighting.
You’re going to get bruises and cuts along the way. I’ll do what I can to mend those.
And you may lose the fight anyway.
But there damned well better be some bruises and cuts on your knuckles when you go down, or what was the point of the forty-two years you’ve already spent here?
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