My Aunt Ruth and Uncle Freeman met on a shooting range in the 1940s. He, a tall, handsome, intelligent man and she, a drop-dead beauty of Norwegian descent. Damn those puns! They crop up everywhere, like shooters in malls and schoolyards. Violence even runs through our language--drop-dead gorgeous was my Aunt Ruth, and not only that:
Ruth (as I called her) was a dead-eye shot.
NRA members both, Freeman and Ruth married, settled down a few blocks from my parents' home, and got to work producing three handsome, strapping boys. The boys grew up as mini-sharpshooters, accompanying the folks to gun ranges and competitions, and taking part themselves.
Ruth, a crackshot, outshot all the women and quite a few of the men, often Freeman himself. In fact, she was so damned good she was Captain of the U.S. Women's Rifle Team. I will dig up a copy of her photo in the Washington Post, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
But Freeman and Ruth didn't just shoot guns. They loved to round dance--a sort of square dance--and Ruth's wide-skirted shimmering dresses and layers of petticoats billowed and swirled as my uncle twirled his Norwegian Annie Oakley around the room with others who shared their love for the dance. After she died, Ruth's son Don spoke at Arlington Cemetery where she was to be entombed, the space beside her reserved for her husband, who would receive his own ___-gun salute after his funeral in the little stone chapel in the midst of those green hills and endless white slabs of marble not too many years later. "My mother grew up in northern Michigan, the child of first-generation Norwegian Americans, and she loved to figure skate. As a boy, I'd watch her on the ice--" Don's voice cracked--"and I thought I'd never seen anyone so beautiful in my life."
Freeman had survived a stroke many years before, and they'd moved to Leisure World to make things easier for him. Ruth took care of him while he continued his passion since retiring from the United States General Accounting Office--genealogy. He'd traced my mother's line back to the 9th Century in some lines. The two of them traveled to Europe and Norway to scour court records and cemeteries for blood links to the past, and they learned that Ruth derived from early Norwegian nobility. Freeman typed complicated lines of family history on a manual typewriter with the two fingers still functional enough after the stroke to do so.
They traveled, they danced, they researched, they visited and entertained their family, they went on Caribbean cruises with my parents during which the fine dining and dancing never stopped--they were, in short, very well-rounded (not to pun their form of dancing) human beings who happened to enjoy guns but didn't make them the end-all and be-all of their existence.
Ruth (as I called her) was a dead-eye shot.
NRA members both, Freeman and Ruth married, settled down a few blocks from my parents' home, and got to work producing three handsome, strapping boys. The boys grew up as mini-sharpshooters, accompanying the folks to gun ranges and competitions, and taking part themselves.
Ruth, a crackshot, outshot all the women and quite a few of the men, often Freeman himself. In fact, she was so damned good she was Captain of the U.S. Women's Rifle Team. I will dig up a copy of her photo in the Washington Post, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
But Freeman and Ruth didn't just shoot guns. They loved to round dance--a sort of square dance--and Ruth's wide-skirted shimmering dresses and layers of petticoats billowed and swirled as my uncle twirled his Norwegian Annie Oakley around the room with others who shared their love for the dance. After she died, Ruth's son Don spoke at Arlington Cemetery where she was to be entombed, the space beside her reserved for her husband, who would receive his own ___-gun salute after his funeral in the little stone chapel in the midst of those green hills and endless white slabs of marble not too many years later. "My mother grew up in northern Michigan, the child of first-generation Norwegian Americans, and she loved to figure skate. As a boy, I'd watch her on the ice--" Don's voice cracked--"and I thought I'd never seen anyone so beautiful in my life."
Freeman had survived a stroke many years before, and they'd moved to Leisure World to make things easier for him. Ruth took care of him while he continued his passion since retiring from the United States General Accounting Office--genealogy. He'd traced my mother's line back to the 9th Century in some lines. The two of them traveled to Europe and Norway to scour court records and cemeteries for blood links to the past, and they learned that Ruth derived from early Norwegian nobility. Freeman typed complicated lines of family history on a manual typewriter with the two fingers still functional enough after the stroke to do so.
They traveled, they danced, they researched, they visited and entertained their family, they went on Caribbean cruises with my parents during which the fine dining and dancing never stopped--they were, in short, very well-rounded (not to pun their form of dancing) human beings who happened to enjoy guns but didn't make them the end-all and be-all of their existence.
