My notebook—mirabile dictu—now contains diagrams of an AR-15 rifle.
On top of my commitments to Homer, Tocqueville, and the Torah, I’m taking a class on gunmanship.
It’s not a skill I thought I’d be adding to my resumé. Before coming out West, I’d never known anyone who owned a gun, or even knew how to shoot one.
I’m really putting the narratives I have about myself to the test. (You know, that I’m a tea-drinking, robe-donning, anglophile aesthete living in the wrong century.)
I thought by doing things entirely foreign to me that I could explode some of the more unhelpful notions I had about myself.
Along the way I’ve realized I actually love things like firing rifles. Ah, the way the buttstock fits perfectly into the nook of your arm! And the subtle but satisfying recoil of the .22 caliber!
A strange new penchant for a girl who once cried for joy when getting a copy of the OED—one of those moments in life which Robert Graves would rightly call a “caricature scene.”
My dear friend emailed me the other day, describing her rollicking London college life. She’s going to bars and parties, events of cultural importance, translating Greek.
I felt bad for a few minutes when I thought about how different (how lonely, how quiet, how intense) my life is compared to hers. A life like hers is one I could’ve had.
Of course, I could still have that life, I realized. I’m not dead yet! My gunslinging pig-skinning life is just one especially weird and inevitably brief period.
I’ll probably always be a bit rainy, and tea-ish, and robe-y.
And one day I’ll be a happily middle-aged patch-elbowed lady in a slate cottage in Dorset who just happens to know how to shoot a rifle.