The Penn Family Talks about Guns and Babies

I had a nice visit with my parents yesterday; they came to drop off a big cushy recliner my mom isn't using anymore and stayed for several hours, mostly just chatting. My nephew Garrett, who is 14 and much-adored by my kids (and by David and me), came along and spent most of the time running the kids ragged in the backyard.

My mom looks good. She had a cardiac catheterization some weeks ago that showed that she has a fully-blocked artery to her heart, and it can't be repaired, and week before last she had a procedure to clean out her carotid artery. So I have been worrying about her. She seems to be recovering well; I could tell from her voice on the phone when she called to ask if yesterday was a good day for a visit that she was feeling better.

It charms me that Yehva reminds my mother of me as a little girl. "How funny," she said drily, "that you should get a daughter who's smart, outgoing, and headstrong." A little bit of grandmotherly schadenfreude there, I think. There's a famous family story (with picture!) about her finding me standing naked in the bathroom sink when I was about Yehva's age, planning to give myself a bath because I wanted one and she wasn't going to give me one. And another famous story from when I was maybe a late 3, and sang a little song for the church. It was my first time in front of an audience, and apparently it was quite a challenge to get me to yield the stage when I was done. I'd still be up there singing, apparently, if I hadn't been small enough to carry off.

We like smart-baby stories in our family, and my parents told me a good one about my 11-month-old nephew, Oscar. Apparently my sister-in-law got him a jack-in-the-box. She cranked the handle, it played its little tune, and then pop! up came the jack-in-the-box. Oscar liked that! So she did it again. He liked it again!

So she scooted the jack-in-the-box over to him and suggested he crank the handle himself. Oscar looked at it a second, and then reached over and popped open the latch on the lid.

We laughed. We are all familiar--as you probably are, too, if you have kids--with those moments when you are torn between thinking, "Wow, I'm so impressed with this kid," and "Oh, man, I am so doomed." Smart kids, we agree, are both a blessing and a burden.

I told my parents a friend's story about taking her kids to a shooting range as part of Be A Tourist In Your Own Town, an event here in Lansing every year where you buy a passport that gets you into all kinds of attractions free for the day. Her son, almost 8, is interested in target shooting, and my friend asked one of the staff how old kids have to be to take lessons. She figured the answer would be "older than 8" and this would be a backup for her own uncertainty about the idea. The guy answered, "Old enough to do it safely, and to follow the rules. These guys could absolutely do it! We work with beginners one on one until we're confident they can do it."

She should have seen enough lawyer shows by now to know you never ask a question you don't already know the answer to.

That story got us talking about guns in our own families. My mom grew up in a house where guns were propped in the corner in every room, and she was always afraid of them and says she only ever fired one once in her life. My dad had a couple of guns in a rack behind the door in the spare room when I was growing up, but I don't remember him using them (he goes to deer camp every year, but he's the kind of "hunter" who can spend a week at deer camp and not notice he forgot his gun at home). He did hunt when I was younger; I was born in October, and he went hunting soon afterwards. He sent home a postcard with a picture of a deer on it. If I remember it correctly, he wrote "Daddy has not seen any deer yet." He addressed it to my mom and brother, and then squeezed "and Susan" into the margin. That offended me when I was a kid: I was an afterthought! But I'm pretty sure 3-week-old me was not bothered by it.

I mentioned my friend Adrianne's Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and my one experience shooting it. My dad said, "I got a concealed carry permit a few years ago."

Me: Oh, yeah? What made you decide to get a concealed carry permit?

My dad: I didn't have one.

Ah.

There was a big locked gun case at my grandparents' house in Gaylord, and men and boys sometimes went shooting when a bunch of us were up there. I shot some, I know; I mostly remember a few times doing target practice in my backyard, shooting paper plates with a gun I only remember as "grandma's deer rifle."

My grandma could shoot a gun; there's a story about her shooting a rabid dog from her back porch when she was eight months pregnant. Though I could be mis-remembering the pregnant part because there's another story about her getting bit by a dog just a few days before my Uncle Charlie was born, and then sometime later my aunt Clara Jean, who was 5 or 6, got bit by a dog and wouldn't stop crying, and when she finally calmed down enough to tell them what was wrong, she said, "I'm too young to have a baby!" An early lesson in correlation v. causation.

On the other hand, my grandma was pregnant six times, so maybe both those things did happen when she was about to have a baby. Just different babies.

My grandpa once shot and killed a rat in the wall of the house. With the expected unpleasant results.

My nephew Garrett seems to be following in my brother's footsteps. He loves dirt bikes and snowmobiles, things with big engines that go fast. He also likes to shoot. His big present from my parents last Christmas was a new rifle he'd been wanting. He's a very good shot, I'm told. My dad said that he is interested in firing "the pistols" but my brother isn't sure about letting him do that. "He's fired a lot of guns, though," my dad said, and rattled off a little list that ended with, "and of course he's fired Gary's machine gun."

Me: Gary has a machine gun?

Not a fully-automatic one, I am assured. Those are illegal. It's a Thompson--a Tommy gun! I said delightedly--with that round magazine like the gangsters in Bugs Bunny cartoons carry around. He also has some kind of deadly Eastern European-made not-an-AK47-but-something-like-that. From this I infer that one of the many things I did not know about my brother is that he collects guns. I think it would be interesting if he agreed to show them to me next time I visit.

Sometimes I feel like my family are all very much like each other--they live together on the same piece of land, for crying out loud! I call it The Penn Family Hilltop Compound. It has two houses on it, and two enormous pole barns full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, a race car, a dune buggy, my dad's little bulldozer ("you'd be surprised how many uses you find for it once you have it," we joked yesterday), the almost-bigger-than-my-house RV my parents roam the southwest in every winter, and God only knows what else. I didn't know about the bulldozer or the machine gun; what other surprises might there be?

Very much like each other, I think sometimes, and not so much like me. This is a feeling that was very painful to me as a child and young adult. But I get more and more peaceful with it as I get older, because, you know, I like them. And because it gets easier for me to see the ways we are alike--my parents and I laughed a lot yesterday, because we have the same sense of humor. We like to tell each other stories. I knew they'd like the story about my friend and her kids at the shooting range; they knew I'd like the story about Oscar and the jack-in-the-box. I told stories about Yehva, full of piss and vinegar and always into something, and my mom told stories about me, much the same. It was a good way to spend an afternoon.