Strange Bedfellows

When I was a kid the arrival of the Cabela's catalog was a big deal.  My Dad would pour over newsprint pages for weeks before finally filling out the order form, writing out a check and sending it all away in the post.  6-10 weeks later the object of his desires would arrive.  Fishing gear, tackle, camping equipment, supplies to work on his guns and make his own ammunition.  My Dad was a hunter and fisher, a sportsman.  When we lived out of the country my Granny would package the catalogs up and sent them APO to wherever we lived.  It's one of the clearest memories I have of my Dad, writing out that check and sending it off, dreaming of future packages.  My Dad always had guns, he built them, hunted with them and taught me to respect them.  I believe he would be horrified at the knee jerk reactions on both sides of the current war of words  God! Guns! Gun control!  Second Amendment.  If we would all just stop shouting our pronouncements into the air we might come up with some solutions.  Maybe.

Recently Cabela's has been opening retail locations in our state.  They have become reliable pit stops for us.  Clean bathrooms, quick snacks in the cafe and mountains of interesting taxidermy.  Every time I take the boys in for crab pots or bathroom breaks I think of my Dad.  He would have been like a kid at Disneyland.  The stuff of  his dreams right there where he could touch it.  I wish the boys could have known him.  I suspect he would have disapproved of nearly every aspect of their upbringing.  He would have loved them anyway.  He disapproved of nearly every teenage decision that I made.  He loved me anyway.  When he was killed my family fell apart and I disappeared.  It was years before my mother really looked at me again.  I try not to judge, I have never been a widow so I don't know.

The day after my father died I had a job interview at a local burger stand on the beach.  I was 16.  No one noticed.  I remember that I had a small pimple in my ear, I would push on it every so often just so it would hurt and I would know that I was still here.  I worked all day in the burger shack, and came home to find that my bag had been packed and I was being shuttled off to my Aunt's house. I was in the way and my Mom couldn't look at me. ** I spent the next ten days sleeping on the couch in my Aunt's suburban living room watching cable TV ( a first for me) and dreaming of watery corpses walking up the stairs dripping river weed and small fish.  I always imagined that they were trying to tell me where we would find my father's body.

On day ten they found his body in the river and I went home to plan the funeral.  I seemed to be the only functioning member of my family, but I was still invisible.  My grandparents focused on my Mom, my Mom focused on the air. No one focused on me.  I did the calling of relatives, the laying out of funeral clothes, the wording on the headstone.  No kid should have to do that.

The Cabela's catalogs continued to arrive long after my Dad's death.   No one thought to call and stop them.  When we stop in at Cabela's I smirk a little.  My gunsmithing, hunting, rough and tumble Dad would have a good laugh at his liberal socially conscious grandsons ogling the taxidermy and roaming the aisles of his dreams.  For me, it feels like visiting a a happy moment of my childhood with my Dad.  It almost blots out the horror of how it all ended.

** I my Mom's defense, many years later she apologized for being so absent when I really needed a parent.  She had found out about the all day job interview and said she had no idea at the time. She was proud of me for just getting on with it.  She was in nursing school when my Dad was killed.  She missed exactly one day.  She was just getting on with it too.