Friday 14th
December will be remembered for many things. Let me share with you a
sequence of events quite disconnected from the grievous shooting in
Sandy Hook.
I currently served in a
church in Newtown and one in Hamden. We were schedule to have a
management meeting on Friday 14th in the afternoon and
evening. At 48 hours notice the meeting was canceled, and I was left
with a four hour 'hole' in my schedule, which I decided to fill by
going hunting with my Hawken muzzle loader. I arrived at the hunting
land at 2:30 in the afternoon, and tried to turn my cell phone ringer
off only to find that the phone had been off all morning. Turning it
on I received various texts about the shooting in Sandy Hook;
disturbing given I was sitting on a log some 4 miles south of Sandy
Hook Elementary School. After several rapid phone calls it was
evident that no one I knew was directly involved and there was no
assistance that I could provide that was not already being given by
others.
I hiked a couple of
hundred yards to my deer stand and waited. From 3 PM until sunset,
there was a complete absence of any animal activity-surprising and
frustrating, no squirrels, no birds, no turkey and certainly no
whitetail deer. Plenty of time to think about the massacre 4 miles
away, and then on gun control la
ws.
My mind wondered to politics and religion, I'll spare you the latter,
but did you know that
Calvin
Klein donated $78K, 100% went to Democrats
while
WalMart
donated
$467K, 97% went to Republicans
.
I know where I will be buying my briefs.
Hey, the things you end up thinking about when in your stand.
Dusk fell and the light
faded, so I discharged the musket into the ground, waited for the
smoke to clear and returned through a copse of swamp maples to my
car. The land owner was waiting for me at my Santa Fe, his home being
close by. We talked briefly before I had to take a pee. You all know
how it is, I'd been in a car or up the tree for 4 hours, so with his
permission I retreated behind one of many log piles back in the copse
of maples.
As I stood there enjoying
the momentary relief, I reflected on the fruitless 'hunt'. In 2010 my
son, then 5, would often greet me on my return home with the words,
“Daddy have you been hunting nothings again.” Apparently I am
highly skilled at hunting 'nothings', but that's why it is called
hunting not catching. As I stood there in the post dusk gloom with
such recollections mocking me, I farted with force and volume. Two
seconds later a 'grunt' of similar tone rang out from deeper in the
maples close to my stand. I turned to look, hands still on the old
crown jewels and there 45 yards away was a deer! My silhouette was
masked by the large wood piles, so he had not seen me though he had
evidently heard my 'grunt' and responded with his own. Inevitably my
movement caught his eye; he looked over and then turned and trotted
off right across the shooting lane I had so attentively guarded just
25 minutes earlier. To say I was frustrated would be a gross
understatement! I had no idea how many points his antlers totaled, so
for the sake of this yarn I speculate in the double figures. At the
time all I could say was, “Well the blast of my Hawken musket did
not scare him off, but the blast from my but drew him in.” May be
there is a place for CK briefs!!
Did I ever deserve a pit
stop at Dunken Donuts!