GUNS, GUNS, GUNS. For me, guns have always been more of a theoretical idea—something I read about or saw on TV. As a kid, the closest I came to seeing a real gun was the occasional BB gun, or a friend who had a pellet gun.

There was one kid in middle school who described the first time he went hunting with his father and killed a deer. He came back covered in blood, and the other hunters ridiculed him. That didn’t sound like much fun to me, so I generally stayed away from guns.

Years later, when my father-in-law was downsizing and moving out of his house, an issue came up about a gun he owned—some kind of revolver, a heavy gun. There was a family story that he had shot someone in his house with it. For some reason, everyone thought I should be the one to take care of this gun. So I ended up driving it to the police station, very carefully, with a bunch of newspaper crumpled around it in a box, nestled in the trunk, pointing away from where I thought the gas tank might be.

At the police station, there were people there with lots of guns—or maybe just lots of people with guns. The officer behind the glass window had to confirm things with another officer. Eventually, one of them came out and looked at it. 

“Why do you want to get rid of it?” 

They didn’t want it, either, but eventually they decided one of them could take it, after all. I left, but then realized I should probably get a receipt. So I had to go back. It might have been easier to throw it into a lake, but no one had ever taught me how to check a gun for bullets.

After my mother died, we found a small, gold-handled pistol tucked away in a shoebox. It almost looked like a toy. Then we found a journal entry from my father, describing how he’d used that gun when he and my mother were dating. They went on a picnic, and shot a snake with it. They were not fond of snakes. Any snake found on their property was immediately beheaded.

My sister ended up taking the gun. She carries it in her pocketbook.

That’s everything I know about guns.