Dad as Boy

No one ever guesses that the quiet old farmer in front of them got his start in life as a weapons dealer. I'm not entirely sure what the usual signs of a weapons dealer would be, but I can assure you that he has none of them. So when people find out, they are invariably baffled. Anyone who has had so much as a conversation with him is shocked to the core. It's at this point of bewilderment that a few more details of the story need to be told. He was just a kid and the weapons were pea shooters (or so he calls them) made from pilfered clothespins. Other kids would put in orders and he would make and distribute the pea shooters on the school bus. The ladies of the community, including his own mother, were frustrated and confused at finding their clothespins continually missing. One day he finally got caught and his life of crime came to an abrupt end.

My sister and I first learned of our dad's questionable past from an old school friend of his. This friend told many stories of their school days and in most of them, he was the one getting in trouble, so it was an exciting day when we learned that our dad had once also had a wild streak! Of course, after learning about his weapon-building skills, we begged him to show us how to make the clothespin guns. What father can long resist the puppy-dog-eyed pleading of his twin daughters? It wasn't long before he gave in.

Somewhere in the range of forty years had passed between my dad's weapon dealing days on the school bus and his attempt at passing down the art to his daughters. A lot can happen in forty years. Like forgetting how to build a pea shooter. But my dad is pretty mechanically minded and has always worked with his hands, so he figured out how to make it work after only one afternoon of fiddling with some wooden clothespins that we scrounged up from around the house. Another thing that can happen in forty years is that clothespin manufacturers can lower the quality of their wares. The newer clothespins just didn't shoot as well as the old ones. And this wasn't just my dad remembering his products performing better than they actually did. We found some old clothespins that our grandmother had used decades before and they made undeniably better weapons. I suppose it wouldn't really have been a trip down memory lane if my dad hadn't had the opportunity to say, "They just don't make clothespins the way they used to!"

Twenty years after learning the craft of building pea shooters from my dad, I still find it odd that he was known among his schoolmates for being able to weaponize something as innocuous as clothespins. I have never seen my dad weaponize any of the usual things: fists, words, silence. Even though we live in the country and he's used actual guns before, he doesn't even own one; he hasn't for as long as I can remember, even though I hear he's a pretty good shot. My dad may be the most peaceful man I've ever met.

Here are the times I can remember my dad using a gun:

1) To shoot a steer when it was time to butcher it.

2) That one summer an addled woodpecker repeatedly woke me up very early in the morning by pecking on an eavestrough outside my bedroom window instead of an actual tree. Dad shot it right in the head with a BB gun. Like I said, he's a good shot. Unfortunately, in this instance, it was the wrong choice. The woodpecker's head was so hard that it was back to pecking on the eavestrough again after taking a mere three days to recover. We figured it may as well live.

According to my dad, he never even shot the pea shooters he used to make. He gets uncomfortable when my mom makes the classic joke about him scaring off our potential dates with a shot gun. He saves stranded kittens, even when seven other cats already live in our barn. I can't imagine him deciding to arm his schoolmates with weapons, harmless as they may have been. So who was this boy, crouched down in his seat on the bus, taking apart clothespins and putting them back together as pea shooters? Was he furtive? Did he giggle? When he got caught, did he feel bad about it? Was he relieved to have an excuse to leave behind weapons dealing and become the farmer he was always meant to be?