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A Different Time

It’s marvelous how reviewers reduce a three hour movie to a single sentence! The movie led this by representing a many hundred page epic.  And that massive tome was the encapsulation of a human experience spanning decades.
The final condensation comes in my one word reply to, “Did you like it?”

Well, the answer is a resounding “yes!” with a smile. In this case, yes!

All this, that is, if my dad’s life really had been turned into a movie.

He lived nearly to his 83rd year and the more I learn of him and how he spent his life, the better I like it.
His parents are gone, having preceded him by decades as it should be. He was the eldest child. So I don’t expect to learn much about his early years yet.

But to my joy, I find reliable first hand accounts of his life from people who were there with him. Tonight, I spoke with his best friend. It is always a treat to learn from such. I just wish I’d talked less and listened more to draw out the imagery of times just as real as today which would otherwise remain locked away in the hearts of those who lived them.

With the population density being lower and attitudes tamer, the weekend recreational opportunities were quite different in dad’s child hood world. Imagine boys today going to the tracks and shooting off two hundred rounds of ammunition, unsupervised. They wouldn’t get three blocks without anonymous complaints pouring into the police station by concerned citizens, documenting them through a little gap in the curtains with their phone on video mode while they themselves huddled beneath the sill, hidden and shaking.

But in my father’s day, it was a perfectly acceptable use of a weekend to round up friends and go plink or shoot skeet. This gave them practice to attend and handily win turkey shoot competitions one after another. The prize, if not a turkey, could be bacon or ham.
It seems that my father was a competitive lad, which led to serious advantage in cards and hunting.

A few years ago, he gave away shotguns from his collection. All were excellent quality.
The guns were not toys exclusively for sport at the range.  While guns were used to shatter airborne clay discs, that was just the practice. They were then employed in the acquisition of food and the bagging of game animals. Birds, squirrels, vermin, deer, bear, elk, and even moose fell in their turn over the years. Dad was a hunter.

He wasn’t alone, and I think that made it all the more enjoyable. Brothers and friends camped, hunted, and fished together.

I am sure that some individuals today would simplify this as a blood thirsty, vile recreation. There was a time when people understood  better, and my father grew up in that time.

Friendships are a precious experience, I must say.  But they are not without disagreement. My grandfather recounted how his dad lost his very best friend over such a thing. But it doesn’t always end. Sometimes the worst disagreement is over the choice of reels in fishing gear. One prefers the baitcast reel, the other favors the spinning reel. In a real friendship, this just means the fishing poles never get mixed up!

And thus it was.

 

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