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Tina's Got A Gun
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Tina's Got A Gun
P.J. O'Rourke, 09.16.02
What do you say when your wife tells you she wants to learn to shoot? How about, "Yes, dear."
My wife is afraid of birds. She's not terrified afraid, not "chicken," as it were. Tina just considers birds to be air lizards, icky velociraptors in bad boas. They give her the creeps. She feels about birds the way other people feel about snakes or spiders or New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
I, on the other hand, love birds. I spend a lot of money every year and travel thousands of miles for my love of birds. I trudge across acres of muddy fields, push through tangles of forest underbrush and hunker in swamps at dawn simply to find birds--and shoot them. Call it tough love.
Every good marriage is a compromise. For years, Tina displayed no nervous symptoms about mallards in the freezer, as long as the gutting and plucking had been done somewhere other than her kitchen (or laundry room, as I had occasion to be reminded). And I didn't go after pheasants in South Dakota on our wedding anniversary.
Then one day Tina said, "I want to learn to shoot. I want to go bird hunting." Why? A more recently married person would have asked that aloud. But if I suddenly said, "I want to learn to empty the dishwasher. I want to get up in the middle of the night when the kids cry," Tina wouldn't check the medicine chest to see what I'd been taking until later. She'd say, "Great!"
I said, "Great!" But I was worried. Tina wanted to learn to shoot. I mentally reviewed my recent behavior. I was pretty sure she was using "shoot" as an intransitive verb. I didn't think I detected an elision of "you" at the end of the sentence.
Maybe Tina had been listening to me. It's always worrisome when a spouse does that. I'd been telling Tina that the way to get over her fear of birds was to go hunting. "Shoot at them," I advised, "and after you miss the little s.o.b.'s three or four times in a row, you won't be scared, you'll be angry." Did I really want an angry wife?
Or maybe something had happened on our trip to London, when I dragged Tina to the Holland & Holland store. While I was drooling over shotguns, perhaps Tina realized that field sports present a new head-to-toe wardrobe opportunity. A flash of pain ran through my Visa card.
Also I was concerned that if Tina tried bird hunting, she'd hate it. I privately suspect that men and women are different. They don't always love the same things. No doubt Tina had similar gender-based anxieties when our children came along. Probably she was secretly relieved and surprised that I didn't eat them. I thought I'd have to make bird hunting somehow stylish and festive. This was like Tina thinking she'd have to crank up the "heated dry" feature and turn emptying the dishwasher into a macho challenge. How would she, I asked myself, go about convincing me that changing diapers and singing lullabies at 4 a.m. is as much of a good time as sitting shivering and soaked in a pit blind at about the same time of day?
Actually, with proper application of Jack Daniel's, either can be fun. But women, in my experience, are not quite so easily convinced that they are enjoying themselves. I called my friends Perry and Sally Harvey and wrangled an invitation to Brays Island, a magnificent quail plantation in South Carolina.
Brays Island is 5,500 acres of tidewater landscape on the Pocotaligo River not far from Hilton Head. It's pretty much how I picture heaven, with, in the first place, a membership far too exclusive for me. The vast woods and fields and the miles of waterways and marshes are full of wildlife. Besides the quail there's shooting for Hungarian partridge, chukar, pheasants, doves, ducks, turkey and deer. Largemouth bass lurk in the freshwater ponds. The Pocotaligo is replete with redfish, black drum and flounder. In the nearby blue water are sea trout, stripers, bluefish and tarpon. If these pleasures should pall, there's skeet, trap, sporting clays, an 18-hole private golf course, tennis, a pool, a 25-stall boarding stable and 40 miles of equestrian trails. The weather is admittedly less like paradise and more like the other place during the summer, and Brays probably has more gunfire and dead animals than heaven does. Maybe it's the heaven that dogs go to, which, truthfully, is the one I'd prefer. The plantation has 40 bird dogs, in kennels larger and cleaner than my bachelor apartment ever was. I suppose Brays isn't heaven for quail and redfish, although, on previous visits, these critters seemed immortal enough when I would blast or cast.
http://www.forbes.com/fyi/2002/0916/094.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
P.J. O'Rourke, 09.16.02
What do you say when your wife tells you she wants to learn to shoot? How about, "Yes, dear."
My wife is afraid of birds. She's not terrified afraid, not "chicken," as it were. Tina just considers birds to be air lizards, icky velociraptors in bad boas. They give her the creeps. She feels about birds the way other people feel about snakes or spiders or New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
I, on the other hand, love birds. I spend a lot of money every year and travel thousands of miles for my love of birds. I trudge across acres of muddy fields, push through tangles of forest underbrush and hunker in swamps at dawn simply to find birds--and shoot them. Call it tough love.
Every good marriage is a compromise. For years, Tina displayed no nervous symptoms about mallards in the freezer, as long as the gutting and plucking had been done somewhere other than her kitchen (or laundry room, as I had occasion to be reminded). And I didn't go after pheasants in South Dakota on our wedding anniversary.
Then one day Tina said, "I want to learn to shoot. I want to go bird hunting." Why? A more recently married person would have asked that aloud. But if I suddenly said, "I want to learn to empty the dishwasher. I want to get up in the middle of the night when the kids cry," Tina wouldn't check the medicine chest to see what I'd been taking until later. She'd say, "Great!"
I said, "Great!" But I was worried. Tina wanted to learn to shoot. I mentally reviewed my recent behavior. I was pretty sure she was using "shoot" as an intransitive verb. I didn't think I detected an elision of "you" at the end of the sentence.
Maybe Tina had been listening to me. It's always worrisome when a spouse does that. I'd been telling Tina that the way to get over her fear of birds was to go hunting. "Shoot at them," I advised, "and after you miss the little s.o.b.'s three or four times in a row, you won't be scared, you'll be angry." Did I really want an angry wife?
Or maybe something had happened on our trip to London, when I dragged Tina to the Holland & Holland store. While I was drooling over shotguns, perhaps Tina realized that field sports present a new head-to-toe wardrobe opportunity. A flash of pain ran through my Visa card.
Also I was concerned that if Tina tried bird hunting, she'd hate it. I privately suspect that men and women are different. They don't always love the same things. No doubt Tina had similar gender-based anxieties when our children came along. Probably she was secretly relieved and surprised that I didn't eat them. I thought I'd have to make bird hunting somehow stylish and festive. This was like Tina thinking she'd have to crank up the "heated dry" feature and turn emptying the dishwasher into a macho challenge. How would she, I asked myself, go about convincing me that changing diapers and singing lullabies at 4 a.m. is as much of a good time as sitting shivering and soaked in a pit blind at about the same time of day?
Actually, with proper application of Jack Daniel's, either can be fun. But women, in my experience, are not quite so easily convinced that they are enjoying themselves. I called my friends Perry and Sally Harvey and wrangled an invitation to Brays Island, a magnificent quail plantation in South Carolina.
Brays Island is 5,500 acres of tidewater landscape on the Pocotaligo River not far from Hilton Head. It's pretty much how I picture heaven, with, in the first place, a membership far too exclusive for me. The vast woods and fields and the miles of waterways and marshes are full of wildlife. Besides the quail there's shooting for Hungarian partridge, chukar, pheasants, doves, ducks, turkey and deer. Largemouth bass lurk in the freshwater ponds. The Pocotaligo is replete with redfish, black drum and flounder. In the nearby blue water are sea trout, stripers, bluefish and tarpon. If these pleasures should pall, there's skeet, trap, sporting clays, an 18-hole private golf course, tennis, a pool, a 25-stall boarding stable and 40 miles of equestrian trails. The weather is admittedly less like paradise and more like the other place during the summer, and Brays probably has more gunfire and dead animals than heaven does. Maybe it's the heaven that dogs go to, which, truthfully, is the one I'd prefer. The plantation has 40 bird dogs, in kennels larger and cleaner than my bachelor apartment ever was. I suppose Brays isn't heaven for quail and redfish, although, on previous visits, these critters seemed immortal enough when I would blast or cast.
http://www.forbes.com/fyi/2002/0916/094.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878