Just Call Me Ralphie

Remember the movie called A Christmas Story? It's the one which featured an absurdly cute blonde kid with glasses whose only ambition in the late forties was to get a Red Ryder BB Gun, a goal against which all the adults in his life had combined with the cold-bloodedess of the Gadianton Robbers.

I never had a BB gun as a kid. My mother believed what Ralphie's teacher, his mom, and even the department store Santa told him, specifically that I'd shoot my eye out.

I was actually a bit behind Ralphie in age, maybe six or seven years. But things hadn't changed much by the time I was the age he was in the movie. The Russians still wanted to bury us, there were Communists behind every rock, and Christmas was the one time of the year when a kid could be pretty sure of getting what his or her little heart truly wanted. But I never asked for a BB gun. Somehow, I felt that I'd be betraying my mother's feelings if I manipulated Christmas for the purpose of getting what lots of other boys had.

I got to shoot lots of them. It seemed there was at least one in every home where I went to play. I knew how to load and shoot them. But I also knew I'd never own one.

My father bought me a toy long-gun one time that looked just like a BB gun. When I first saw it I thought he'd slipped a cog or become a gun runner in defiance of Mother's wishes. But no, it wasn't actually a BB gun. It was just a pop gun that worked exactly like a BB gun except that it had a large bore instead of the tiny .177" smoothbore tube that real ones had. You would work the lever and then have a charge of air which popped very nicely when you squeezed back on the trigger. I quickly learned, of course, that all I had to do to increase the lethality of this toy was to stick the muzzle into the mud, a substance of which we had a constant plethora in middle Tennessee. The resulting plug of dirt would leave the muzzle at a velocity which brought "shock and awe" to the heart of a little kid. Bucky Crowell and my brother Johnny and I splattered the side of the house and the garage with these soil slugs for some days.

Eventually, of course, this grew boring. Soon I wanted to graduate to something a bit more exciting.

One day Clay Crowell, Bucky's brother, came with him to play in our back yard. We divided up into teams and started the fire fight. The first time Clay charged in my direction, I put the front sight on his face and let him have it. That was the occasion on which I learned that thoughtless acts could really hurt somebody. Bucky had to take the crying child home. I sat in the house for a while, waiting for my demise. I figured that I'd surely deprived him of one eye, maybe both. The way he'd been crying made me feel terrible for him and pretty terrible for myself when all the adults in the neighborhood would eventually track me down.

But they didn't come. No one came! I began to look around the neighborhood through the doors and windows of our little home, expecting to see the lynch mob rounding the corner, but it never showed up. By the next day, I began to venture back out into the yard and even to play, but I was still nervous for a couple of days lest my crime be discovered belatedly.

Never again did I point it at anyone when it had one of those dirt slugs in it. I kept it a few years and played with it a lot, but the whole experience, along with my mother's apparent phobia of real BB guns, had taken away any desire I had to own a real one. Clay Crowell could still see, and I figured that was all the blessing I needed in that affair.

About eight years later, when we'd been living in Idaho for 4 or 5 years and in Rexburg for maybe one year, I decided that I was trustworthy and mature. I boldly asked whether I could have a .22 rifle - a real firearm! I was mildly amazed when I was told I could have one if I bought it myself.

Rainbow Sports Shop on Carlson Avenue in Rexburg was the local gun emporium par excellence. I would stop in there on my walk home from school and stare at the taxidermy and the rifles and the revolvers and the exotic terms on the boxes of ammunition. One day I saw a used .22 rifle with a price tag of $20. Twenty dollars! That was a lot of money, but it was at least an imaginable sum. I signed on to pick spuds during harvest break. We got paid $1 per hour by some poor old farmer who must surely have known that many of the spuds got destroyed in fights as they'd impact our steel baskets and become starch on our jackets. I quit the moment I had made the last dollar I needed to buy the rifle. After all, it was cold and miserable out there in the spud fields.

I brought home my Montgomery Wards Western Field bolt rifle with its five-shot magazine and spent hours learning about everything in it and on it. My father took me up on the south hill which was not occupied back then and taught me to shoot safely. I've lost track of how many firearms I've bought or traded into or sold or traded out of since then.

But a couple of months ago we took Sheryl's daughter, Hannah, and her young man, Erik, out to the Gate City Range to do a little recreational shooting. Everybody was taking turns firing my lovely Savage Mako .22 target rifle. But Erik had brought a BB gun! I asked to try it out. He kindly consented.

Although I rested my shots and practiced the best breath and trigger control, I found it was hard to hit much with it beyond 10 or 12 yards. It was a smooth bore, after all, and didn't do anything to impart a stabilizing spin to the little pieces of BB shot which jumped from its barrel at such modest velocity. But I played with it for about 20 minutes and had a pleasant time. That was all the time with it I needed. I'm good for another 40 or 50 years.