The monkey made me do it

Sharpshootin' with Gram

On one of my trips down to Colorado, my friend and I decided to make a stop in Utah to visit his family and to try a certain variety of raspberry shake that send him into happy delirium just remembering the taste. His parents and siblings, of course, were wonderful. Aunts and uncles, ditto. Paragons of humanity, with great senses of humor and only the most enchanting quirks. Then I met his grandparents, who made me wish five minutes after meeting them that I had thought ahead and brought a full documentary film crew along.

His grandfather was a kindly old man, who personified the puttering stereotype and spent his time messing with old musical instruments and Building Things In The Shop. He had a La-Z-Boy and made us pancakes, and smiled patiently as his wife slowly turned my mental image of "little old lady" upside down. She started almost immediately by sitting my friend and I down and filling us in on the latest conspiracy, which according to her was the recent (or was it recent?) use of the Denver Airport subterranean chambers as an imprisonment camp for good Christian people. She had ominous photos of the sweeping airport building on her fridge. Then she went on about Elian Gonsalez (this was a while ago) and how the CIA had a strong hand on immigration and only let in those that agreed with them on certain key nonsensical points. But her main topic was that evil airport, though I could never get out of her exactly WHICH group was holding those poor Christians hostage, and how she knew of it. So of course it's gotta be true.

When she offered to show us her gun collection, my friend winced and I almost leapt out of my seat with joy. This woman was my new hero, a perfect mix of dementia and violence all wrapped up in a curly-haired, floral-print-wearing bundle of sass. She was what I wanted every grandmother to be. Her weapons were many, I counted at least 20 guns and most were automatic and laser-sighted. She had one that was a working single-shot 22 hidden in a decorative belt buckle. There was a hidden latch that released the gun smoothly from the buckle. She demonstrated. I didn't ask if she'd had to use it. Gram had a favorite batch of weapons that she hid in the very back of her closet. There was a huge M-16, something else that was big and black whose name I can't remember (it was scary looking), and a few smaller silver guns that she explained were the most powerful of them all. She called one her "Para". We decided that the only logical next course of action was to go out shootin'. Since most of her guns were illegal (the source of another diatribe against government regulation), we had to go far out into the back hills of Utah and set up our own clay targets on a hillside remote enough that the explosions would not be heard. Gram apparently had had trouble with the law before. We took turns firing off the guns, testing automatic vs. non and working on my stance. When I fired the "Para", the kickback from that little thing almost knocked me over. The M-16 was much more fun, though I was having too much fun firing it to really concentrate on accuracy. Many small plants died that day. When Gram got her chance, her accuracy amazed me. 80+ or not, she hit almost everything she aimed at and had apparently won many sharpshooting contests in the area (she showed me her press clippings when we got back to the house).

Here are some photos of the guns. Note how I rock the scrunchie even while packing heat.

posted by LadyJay @ 9:24 AM