This Month's Story

It’s January and the post season blahs have set in. It’s the start of a new year that follows a bad year. A year that that has at best been blooey. Well, not exactly. While it is true that last year was bad, it did start out for me with a personal high note: I had a very pleasant after-Christmas surprise.

Let me explain. Everyone suffers from some particular ‘no-no’. The ‘no-no’ has to do with their individual personna. For example, my wife, Stella, has this thing about when she is cooking she can’t stand anyone to be in her kitchen. If we have guests, they have to stay out of the kitchen.

If they do come in, Stella begins to quiver, to stall, to move about mindlessly. If I see that happening, I step in and politely convince the innocent guest to come to the living room and have some egg nog by the fire.

There, that’s it; that’s Stella’s ‘no-no’.

Now, my personal ‘no-no’ starts with the fire in my fireplace. I’m pretty firm about this: its my fire and its in my fireplace. Nobody, absolutly nobody, touches my fire.

“Put down the tongs, Joe I’ll fix that!”

I always try to say it nicely, but Stella tells me later, “Paul, he was our guest, you should learn to be nice.” Telling her that a man shouldn’t mess with another man’s fire doesn’t convince her. I try to say something, anything to explain, but she tells me that no matter what, I was wrong.

That ‘no-no’ is bad. But I have another ‘no-no’ that’s even worse.

I have three guns, a .30 carbine from my time in the service, a .22 to shoot varmits, and a 20 gauge shotgun which I never use. The carbine was badly damaged in Hurricane Katrina and a friend who dabbles in restoring guns, made it well again. He tells that I can fire it again but I haven’t and it sits above my fireplace as a memento of another day of long ago. The other guns are situated by the fireplace.

My ‘no-no’ is that no one touches those guns, no one, not ever, never!!

We have a friend, Jim, who comes by once a week and takes care of things around the farm that I can’t handle. An accident has slowed me down and I need help. Jim is that help. He is a good friend and worker and he’s been coming week after week for about ten years and Stella and I find him indispensible.

One thing, though, Jim is afraid of snakes! More than that, he hates them. There are one or two snakes that hang around our pond and the nearby creek. I never give them much notice, but Jim does.

This has going on for over ten years without any problems on my part. However, the year before last, as Stella and I came home, we heard a shot by the creek.

I quickly went down to the creek and found Jim had shot a snake. I stared at the tableau: him proudly holding up in one hand the snake and in the other hand my .22!!!

I was flabbergasted. I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t. I turned around and went back to the house and busied myself in my office.

That night after Jim had left, I gathered my three guns together and hid them in hideaways around the house.

Well, the guns were gone and nothing was said about them for a year. After this time, I decided that Jim had taken the hint and pulled the carbine out of it’s cubby hole and hung it over the fireplace. The .22, I hung up in my office, beside the book case near the door.

This done I looked about for my shotgun. I looked hard, very hard, but I couldn’t find it. Where had I hidden it?

No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find it!

Days went by, month’s went by, I still couldn’t find it!.

Every so often when my mind turned to it, I would look for my gun. When friends visited I would tell them the story of the hidden shotgun. They would help me look but together, we couldn’t find it. Once a relative of Stella’s stayed for a few days and when I told him the story, he looked the entire days of his visit.

No luck.

January of last year as we were sitting with the post-season blahs like today, we talked about morbid things like when we should take down the Christmas tree. Then apropo of nothing, Stella remarked that maybe we should play our game of ‘look for the shotgun’. I told her that she wasn’t funny.

“Did you look everywhere?”

“Of course, I did.”

“Did you look under the bed?”

I looked at her for a second and then ran out of the room.

It was there, covered with dust, but it was there.

It was, as it turned out, at least for me, a nice start to the year.