Guns and Grandpas

Thought For The Day

John and Ada Johnson

OK, that's not when he taught me.

When I was a child there were a couple of things that happened that deeply affected my personal view of the role responsibilities of one charged with being a father or a grandfather. One of those factors was time which we all know is the director of a good bit of our living conditions. My father had a shoe repair shop, Economy Shoe Rebuilders and he worked full time at Saginaw Steering Gear, a General Motors Manufacturing Facility. That did not leave a lot of time for what we would call "quality time" to spend with me. I spent some time with him in the shoe shop where he did teach me how to repair shoes and the fine art of cleaning up the shop after all of the polishers and grinders had sent fine leather dust like a sheer muslin sheet over the entire building. But, little time was spent in conversation, imagination or philosophizing. Frankly, I can't imagine how he held up doing what he did every day and quite often it included Saturday. 

We did not have what one would think of now as a vacation. We did not go to restaurants for dinner. We did not have "Father and Son" outings. Whenever something like that came up I usually tagged along with a friend's father if it could be worked out. I was not angry about my dad not being able to go with me, I didn't see how he could do it either. But let me go back to the "vacation" part.

These were nothing if not remarkable examples of a different world and a different life style. They typically began with being awaken sometime between 1:00AM and 5:00AM. The packing would have been completed and food stores laid in the car along with blankets, pillows and traveling stuff. The transportation was not equipped with electronic devices with my entertainment in mind. The only entertainment was the radio if it worked and whatever I had brought along in the way of reading material. The radio was for dad, period. The food was soda crackers, ring Bologna and water. It would be meted out in excruciatingly small quantities at exasperatingly long intervals.

It was approximately eight hundred miles between Saginaw, Michigan and Pocahontas, Arkansas. There was a gas station built of field stone with a sign with a lion's head that marked the end of our journey and that lion entered my brain when I got in the car and I willed it to hurry to me for the whole eight hundred miles. For in that gas station awaited a coconut bar colored brown, white and pink that was all for me. Ah, the indulgence of  personal satisfaction. Not far from that gas station was the home of my grandparents.

Now both sets of grandparents lived there not too far apart. My grandpa Johnson was to be the man who taught me about splitting wood and gun safety. What stands out to me as the metric for measuring the effectiveness of his teaching is the way it has locked into me and stayed for these many years. That and the look of horror on my mothers face when he walked through the living room carrying me and a .22 caliber rifle. He told me about guns, what they were for, how they should be handled, never to point it at another person, and never to carry it loaded. It was a single shot rifle. I could not have been more than five or six when that happened. He died not long after that but he left me with that wonderful memory and a respect for guns that has served me well.

©Herb Ratliff, February 9, 2012, All Rights Reserved