Gunning

I spent a good part of today assisting my Father-in-Law with getting a car titled, registered and insured. I love spending time with Poppy, it's sometimes surreal. I guess that the key to the conversation is that Poppy will be 85 years old this coming Thursday. Yes: 85, and he still drives. My wife and I can see the slow deterioration of his memory and abilities, his math isn't quite what it used to be. Healthy as can be for his age however not all things are seen from the outside. When I first met Wendy, we were both looking to land somewhere, just simply land. There was something about her that I hadn't seen in most women I've dated, honesty, straight forward, a bit naive however extremely knowledgeable. I guess settled would be a good word to describe her. I was all but settled, you couldn't sit me still long enough to get a haircut: and I'm bald! She is very much like her father. I arrived at Wendy's house to pick her up, her father wondered out the door, took one look at my car and noticed that there was no license plate on the front. That was my first meeting with the man that is now my Father-in-Law and my friend. Not so many words, a bit point blank, willing to listen to your response, black and white! That's illegal isn't it, he asked: no explanation would suffice. There's a part of Poppy that comes out every once in a while and it takes me back, back to a simpler time, back to my childhood as it were. Poppy gave me 2 double barreled shotguns that he had hidden away. One was his the other his fathers. He then began to speak of: Gunning! Although he wasn't raised quite as deep on the country as I was he did however experience hunting with his father, gunning they called it. Pheasant, quail, the occasional rabbit. A simpler time in a simpler place. What I noticed most was the gleam in his eye as he talked, talked about gunning. Almost like it was a place in time and there was nothing else there but he and his father. I miss those days! I often think back to the beginning of all of this madness, somewhere around 12 years old, a single shot 4.10 and my Dad. We never called it gunning out in the mid-west, at least not as I recall. We called it hunting, I'm sure that it was the same thing. I sit here tonight surrounded by hunting equipment, clothes, paperwork, arrows and mounts and I can't help but wish in some small way I could go back, back to being 12 and being there with my father walking the fields and sitting in the blinds. I'm torn between being blessed to have had the opportunity and being cursed for a memory that I can never relive. I snuck out to the safe today and took a quick look at the double barrels in the back corner. I touched one as if to say thanks, thanks for taking Poppy to that place with his father. Thanks for giving a kid from Nebraska and a kid from New Jersey something in common that comes from the soul. Hunting is much more for me than an event, it's a place where there is no wrong. If the weather is bad that's a good thing, if you don't get anything it doesn't matter and if you share it with someone else it lasts a lifetime. In 8 days I head out for an Ohio archery hunt. I'll be sharing the experience with my hunting buddy and friend Rich. My thoughts are more on him harvesting a deer than on me harvesting a deer, but then that's hunting for me. It will no doubt be yet another moment in time that when its over can never be relived, just remembered. Like I'll always remember Poppy: my Father-in-Law, my friend!