The “one more thing” I referred to at the end of the last post was a gun.
I had obtained it in the weeks leading up to the reputed and often debated end of the millennium. Regardless of where you stood on that debate though, and I’m talking about the question as to which year numerologically speaking was the last of the twentieth century, the then looming potential computer problem that threatened our very way of life was of the opinion that 1999 was that last year and that a millennium would end and another start when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. Nobody really knew for certain how that problem would manifest itself once the clock reached midnight that day and the new millennium began and, despite the fact that I didn’t really believe that there would be much, if any, tangible effect, I wanted to at least have a gun in the house just in case something did happen.
One of my closest friends from those days, J.P., who I had met a couple of years earlier at the dog park (he had a large black Great Dane named Phoebe), had lent me the gun. He was ex military and had spent at least one tour of duty looking out over the de militarized zone between North and South Korea. After his discharge, he had run various businesses, one of which was a gun shop. That business was defunct by the time I met him, but he still kept quite a large collection of weapons of various types in his house.
He knew that neither my wife nor I had ever owned a weapon. I was sure that he didn’t approve, but then my wife and I both came from a somewhat different culture than he did, me from England where even the police don’t routinely carry anything more than a short truncheon – although the first time I saw security forces of any type carrying machine guns was in an airport in London and it is only in the recent, post 9/11 years, that I have seen the same within the borders of the United States – and my wife, also born of English parents, from an area in New Jersey where gun ownership and possession was frowned upon and discouraged.
By the way, while I’m in the neighborhood of the subject, when I learned, at nine and a half years old, that my family was leaving England and moving to the United States, it seemed a very frightening prospect, in part because of the sidearms openly and routinely worn by the police. Everything about America seemed scary to that young English boy that was me though; even the winter in America seemed bigger and more deadly. I remember fearing, perhaps because of ominous comments made by my friends, that I would find death in America while trapped in a car in the snow. Of course, that particular fear could also have had something to do with the timing of our move. We moved around Thanksgiving Day in 1977, less than one year removed from a particularly bad blizzard in the United States and a news report, that I still seem to vaguely remember watching on television, of a car buried in a snow bank. And it didn’t matter to that nine and a half year old mind that we were headed to Tampa, Florida instead of Buffalo, New York. Anyway, we made the move without incident and my fear of the United States gradually subsided over time as the country changed from a great unknown to the familiar.
Guns though were a different issue, they have never moved into the familiar for me. Neither my parents nor their respective spouses ever owned any guns while I was growing up, and they still don’t. My only personal experience with and knowledge of guns from those years came first when a close friend of mine from eleventh grade, who wanted to become an Army Ranger, acquired a .22, with which the two of us spent at least one or two afternoons shooting at soda cans that we had arranged on a fence and then later when an acquaintance from school killed himself with one while sitting in the passenger seat of his friend’s car.
Nevertheless, I told J.P. one day at the dog park, while we were sitting on the trunk of a tree that, still living, grew horizontally out over the Chattahoochee River, a victim of the combination of erosion of the river’s bank and gravity, watching our dogs run around in the grass or splash and swim in the river, that I would feel better if I had something in the house when the millennium turned, even something as small as a handgun, just in case the unlikely happened. He agreed to lend me one of the two .357 Magnum revolvers that he owned, but only after he had taken me to the shooting range so that he could give me a lesson on the use of the gun.
After I had gone through my lesson of the proper way to handle and shoot – and the proper respect to give – the gun, I had taken one of them home. I kept it under the bed in the master bedroom. I had put it there so that I would be able to quickly gain access to it should a crisis situation arise.
On that night in the very early morning of December 30, 1999 though, that placement was very inconvenient and meant that I would have to go back up to the master bedroom once again if I was going to take the gun with me.
One question in the back of my mind when I was considering whether to take the gun with me was what I would face when I arrived down there in Panama City. I was going into the heart of M.P.’s husband’s territory, the “heart of darkness”, as I have seen Florida described more than once
somewhere, and the portion I was going to be visiting was among the darkest of all. His family was all down there and who knows what would happen or who would be there to greet me when I arrived. For all I knew the entire Bolivian army was down there waiting in ambush and I wouldn't even have Sundance with me.
But the truth is I didn’t expect to be using the gun in that fashion or in any fashion at all. The real reason the idea of taking the gun with me on my trip to Panama City was appealing, more than anything else, was that when I returned to my house, whenever that may be, I didn’t want to face an angry and also armed wife. I knew from experience that she could let anger get the better of her and appear in her reactions on occasion not entirely rational in situations that may not actually have warranted such a reaction and the situation involving M.P. would certainly warrant it. Given what was I was going to do that night and what was likely to happen after that, I didn’t want to face my wife at her most irate and with access to a gun.
So, after brief consideration, I decided I would take the gun with me.