Boys and Guns

I remember one year for Christmas I got a gun. It wasn’t as cool as the airsoft guns you see now days, but it was pretty cool. You could load it with these little soft yellow pellets and they would shoot one-at-a-time with very little intensity.

I loved the gun. I wanted one so bad and I remember having it for all of about 30 minutes. I shot my sister with it in the arm (accidentally) and my dad got furious. He grabbed the gun away from me and tried to snap it in half. I clearly remember almost laughing as he tried to break the gun.

This was my real dad mind you and if it had been my step dad I would never have thought about laughing. I would have been terrified, but my real dad had never spanked me.

I only remember getting spanked by my real dad one time and that was when we went to Disney World and I complained too much that my feet hurt. My real dad always favored my sister Dena and he carried her on his shoulders but her never carried me. Yes, my feet hurt, but part of me was crying out for attention that I never received from him.

I am thinking about getting him a set of fathers day gift baskets each one filled with the things he never gave me and some of the things he took away – like his love and a yellow pellet shooting gun.