Jo Anne Worley of Laugh-In once said that she dreamt about the secrets of the universe, and quickly scribbled them onto a piece of paper at her bedside.

The next morning, she awoke and read the paper.  "Cottage cheese." 

My dad with his brother, fishing.  Wyoming, 1954.

I wonder if it was that gun.  I wonder what happened to it.

That gun saw a lot of action when I was a child.  We'd be out in the sagebrush near the oil leases, where rabbits would occasionally be target practice.  I didn't like the noise.  I didn't like the violence.  I didn't understand the point.

I knew he kept it under the seat of his pick-up truck.  You had to do that sort of thing in Wyoming, never sure what you'd run into, and where.  I assumed then it made more sense for an unexpected grizzly bear or a wolf than an errant security breach of unsecured oil fields.  Wyoming didn't really stop being rough and tumble, long after the Hole-in-the-Wall gang.  

I leaned into the long rifle range at 4-H camp in Alpine and squinted at the target down my lane.  It wasn't a comfortable posture for me.  It wasn't something I was comfortable holding.  I squeezed the trigger, and closed my eyes.

Hunting was a way of life.  Most men knew how to handle a gun, and many women.  Aside from 4-H camp, I never touched one.  Even years later when a friend's husband who collected guns pulled them out one by one from his cabinet where they were proudly displayed, I pulled back, not wanting my fingerprints on any of them, not trusting what they could do.

I had been hunting, accompanied my dad on hunting trips, deer and elk, hated the sound of the shot echoing in the frost, the loud release.  I knew the gun had taken down a grizz.  I always hoped whoever was handling the gun knew what they were doing.

Close encounter with a grizz.  Wyoming, 1955. 

I wonder about the kids handed the guns.  My husband wasn't much more than nineteen when he was given a plane to fly into war in Europe.  Knowing how to use a gun was essential to his survival, but I didn't give it much thought during our marriage, always knowing that in our home somewhere lurked two of them, a German Luger that had been a souvenir of war, and an antique rifle that his lost son had used in Crack Squad at Shattuck.  I'd ask him repeatedly if they were loaded.

"Always assume a gun is loaded," he'd reply.

Something in the back of memory nagged me about children stumbling onto guns in homes, horrible tragic accidents ensuing.  From the outset of our marriage I resisted letting anyone have even pretend guns in our house, something a young nephew might have been too small to appreciate, something his parents might not have fully understood.  I hoped that when the time came those who needed to use guns would be well trained in using them.  I just didn't want them to be children.

That gun was for a time in my dad's closet, high on a shelf with silver dollars and handwritten notes.  When he died, his father and brother took the guns.  So nothing bad would happen with them.

My mother was daydreaming in a meeting last night, a strange reverie about my grandfather's house, my uncle and his sons, and a gun lying across the bed.  She set it aside.