The first time I fired a gun in my life I was in my early 40s. I was at a hunting cabin in the Catskill region of Upstate New York. (Insert girl-from-the-City-visits-deep-rural-country joke here.) We were staying at a friend’s place for the weekend (yes with indoor plumbing) and decided it would be fun to use some old household canned goods from the pantry that had gone bad for target practice. The gun of choice was a .22 Ruger rifle with a scope and although I’m terrible with estimating distance, I wanna say the range to our target was about 100 feet. We started by drawing a standard circle graph on a tree and I hit the bullseye on my very first shot. And on my second. Jeez, I was a smoking gun! And then the fun really started.
We blew up two cans of expired black beans, one jar of tomato sauce, a two-liter bottle of ginger ale that completely exploded in spectacular fashion and shot a hole through the letter ‘P” in a tube of stale Pringles. Then we got fancy. My friend took a can of soda and laid it down on a nearby tree stump so that the top was facing us and dared me to shoot straight through the pull tab. So I did. Bang. A clean through and through! (I learned that from Law & Order.) This was fun! (We were in the mountainous woods on 126 miles of private property. Was this a secret CIA marksmanship tryout? Hmmm. Just a thought.)
Years later I was on a corporate retreat and we went clay shooting, and I came out the winner that day; my eye hand coordination was still as sharp as ever. (See details in my post, Ducks In A Row from February 21st.) But since the clays trip, I haven’t picked a firearm since. Although damn, I thought about it during the Bring A Weapon To Work Day ritual at one of my old jobs. (Kidding of course! I’ve never been a fan of or a party to any type of violence or the threat of violence.) But recently I was on a business trip in Wisconsin and one of the lovely women I met mentioned that her meat freezer in the garage housed extras, and whatever she and her girlfriends had killed recently. I do so admire a woman who can take aim and bring home the bacon! So the badass gun toting markswoman persona that I once was came rushing back to me and I recounted some of my Ruger skills to her. “Not bad for a City girl!” she howled. And she was right.
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