BB Guns, a Mortgage and the Flow of Mystical Energy

     After years of living in apartments, my wife Lori and I just bought our first home, a bungalow just a couple of blocks from Lake Monona on Madison's east side. It's a nice little house, and we like it a lot. But while owning a home to me chiefly means that at long last I have a place to bury fish guts, it means much more to Lori. She's been painting like a fiend, using colors with names like "Seafoam" and-- I'm not kidding-- "Frosty Melon." With names like that, it's obvious that paint companies are catering to women. If they catered to sportsmen, my den would be "August Algae Bloom," and not "Pear Cactus."

     Lori also bought new furniture, which she's been arranging according to the principles of feng shui. Since most outdoorsmen come from the "Case of Beer Doubles as an End Table" school of decorating thought, I'll explain: Like 99 percent of manufactured goods, feng shui is from China, and supposedly it alters the home environment by improving the flow of Ch'i, or universal energy. After trying dozens of furniture combinations, Lori discovered that the chief obstacle to the harmonious flow of energy in our home was, in fact, me. That's alright. I like it down here behind the water softener, with the litter boxes for our four cats and the scaps of wood left by the previous owner. My goose decoys are here, too, and while Lori's upstairs thinking color combinations I'm thinking of punching some Horicon Zone tags with my friend Bruce this fall.

     I am allowed out of the basement on an every-other-Tuesday basis, and this was my week. I was lying in bed, wide awake, and I could tell that Lori was awake, too.

     "You know, I've been thinking," she said. "I'd really like a winding cobblestone path."

     Ironically enough, I had been thinking the exact same thing, though where the path would wind to I have no idea, since the toad which lives in our backyard can traverse the entire length of it in about 3.5 seconds.

     Actually, I had not been thinking of a winding cobblestone path. I had been thinking of something far, far better, and no, it did not involve Keira Knightley, a hot day, and two hundred pounds of gelatin. I had been thinking of building an airgun range in the basement. Not only would it give me something to do during those bleak days between gun deer season and turkey hunting, but it would make our cats' trips to the litter box far more interesting. A home airgun range would also do something else: bring back a piece of my childhood.

     Remember how much fun BB guns were? Do you remember the thrill of seeing a long box under the tree at Christmas, and the pleasant heft of a tube of BB's?

     My brother Craig and I had twin Daisy air rifles when we were growing up in Menasha, and we spent hours in the basement with those guns, shooting at targets and pop cans and plastic soldiers suspended from a string. We were jealous of a neighbor who had a barrel-cocking European pellet gun which achieved velocities over 1,000 feet per second, but when it came to any kind of competition my brother and I always won. Since we spent countless hours behind the sights of our guns, we were far better shots.

     Mostly, our BB guns were directed at inanimate objects. I hesitate to say this, but I say "mostly" because I did once plug my brother from hiding as he walked home from school. That we are close siblings now is something to wonder at, and I suspect that at some future Thanksgiving between the corn bread and the pumpokin pie he'll drill me with his Daisy and yell, "Twenty years! For twenty years I've been waiting to do that!" That's alright. He already got me back. In high school I had no luck with girls, to the point where I was considering buying a mail-order bride just so I could get a date. My buddies and I would be at my parents' kitchen table, trying to remember which card was trump, and Craig would waltz in with a dozen of the most beautiful girls to be found in the Fox Valley. Maybe it was his prowess with a BB gun.

     Sometimes Craig and I trained our sights on my father's nemesis: starlings. Dad had a birdhouse which he had built erected on a pole in the backyard. It was intended for purple martins, but its chief tenants were starlings and English sparrows. We'd be at the dinner table, with Craig and I trying to sneak scraps to our collie Bonnie, and Dad would hiss "Starling!" One of us would slowly nose a barrel through the kitchen window, tighten a trigger finger, exhale and...

     "Pa-tink!"

     Of course I long ago graduated from cans and starlings to deer and geese and turkeys. My wife Lori was kind enough to let me buy a gun cabinet for my new den-- I guess it didn't interfere with the Ch'i too much-- and there are a couple of empty slots. One of them might just have to be occupied by a BB gun-- maybe even a Daisy like I had when I was a kid. Then, one day when winter is getting to me, I'll slip into the basement with a tube of BB's and while away the hours plinking at targets.

     A man has to get away from Frosty Melon somehow.