Grandpa Teaches Firearm Safety

Grandpa teaches Firearm Safety

I must have been about five years old. The memory is hazy but intact.

Mom and dad had taken big brother Joe and gone to Chicago to see the Big City in the family car.
They left me with Mom's parents Grandma and Grandpa Clayton in their rustic wooden cabin in the Apple Mountains near my hometown, Albuquerque, New Mexico. (If you can spell it, you must be a native.)

Oh, what a wonderful cabin it was!

Though I missed my family passionately, I liked that cabin; the smell of the woodstove fire early in the morning. The silence and sounds of the surrounding pine forested mountains.

I was a little afraid of Grandpa though.

He was such a tough old coot, with his seldom-shaved whiskers so scratchy when he affectionately rubbed his cheek on mine. But Grandpa was a Real Cowboy of the sort I thought I might someday be when I grew up. (I'm still waiting.)

He was tough and stringy and seemed always to be working with wood--I still love the sawdusty turpentiney smell of freshly cut wood!

Grandpa smoked "roll-your-own" cigarettes and always had the paperboard disk which hung from the closing strings of his Bull Durham tobacco bag dangling out of his shirt pocket. He would give me the white cotton tobacco bag to play with when it was empty. I liked the way the empty bag smelled too.

The only smell I didn't like around there was their outdoor toilet! And I didn't like the big slow, shiny flies that buzzed around it either or the newspapers for toilet paper. That outhouse was so different from our clean modern bathroom with soft toilet paper in the valley.

But the reddish light outlining the knotholes in the thin pine plank walls in the daylight hours made even the outhouse intriguing.

Grandma, always busy in her kitchen, was entirely nice.

She was soft and snugly and smelled like vanilla cookies. I was never afraid of her.
Early in the morning Grandma usually made pancakes with crisp fried bacon on the side.

Grandpa would pour blackstrap molasses over the melting butter on my pancakes for me. That pungent bittersweet fluid was very different from the mild, sweet maple syrup we used at home. In fact, it was awful, but since that's what cowboys always ate, Grandpa said, I never dared complain.

He poured a little coffee into my morning mug of milk too. I never got that kind of treatment at home because Mom said coffee "would stunt my growth".

Grandpa treated me almost like a little grown up man.

Being a Real Cowboy, Grandpa owned several real guns and the one I found most fascinating and tempting was the long .44 pistol he kept handy under his bed pillow.

This “six-gun” was always loaded because that was the kind of frontiersman Grandpa was and I'm not exaggerating a bit when I say that he came from a generation of white men in the American southwest that really did "carry the law on their hip".

Grandpa's .44 was terrible and fascinating to me. I had only glimpsed it, but I knew where it always was; right under his pillow.

One day Grandpa said: "Tommy, would you like to shoot my pistol?"

"Sure, Grandpa!" (A dream comes true.)

"Come on then. Let's go outside."

Carrying the gun, Grandpa led me out behind the woodshed and into the stony lot back of his mountain cabin. He placed an empty tin can on a fallen log with the tan-colored rise of the hill close behind it.

"There’s your target Tommy,” he said, "Do you think you can hit that?"

Grandpa helped me hold the gun. It was much bigger and heavier than I imagined it would be. I had seen Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy twirl their six-guns and shoot bad guys in the Saturday matinees at the Kimo Theater--I even had my own toy cap gun for my cowboy play too, but this heavy, complicated piece of steel and ivory was more than I expected.

"Look, Tommy, I'll put my hand behind yours to help keep it steady. Now aim straight and pull the trigger."

Grandpa's big lean strong hand was right behind mine, carrying most of the weight of the dangerous pistol. I strained to pull the trigger. It always had looked so easy...(kid's play: "Bang, bang, you're dead!")

Suddenly the gun fired with a deafening explosion.

The recoil, the "kick", carried my hand and arm back over my head. If Grandpa hadn't controlled the weapon with his hand it probably could have broken my arm or knocked out some teeth.

("That gun always kicks like a mule,” he said.)

As it was, my hand was numb with shock and the detonation had almost deafened me.

I have no idea where the big lead bullet went, but the can hadn't been touched.

"Well, Tommy, that was pretty good. Would you like to shoot it again?"

"No, Grandpa."

Grandpa took the gun back inside and put it back under his pillow.

I had learned firearm safety.

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