“I didn’t hear the phone ring over the sound of my AK47.”
by Zia ~ April 13th, 2006. Filed under: Ephemera, Exigencies.My mother, who is going to Iraq tomorrow, has been in training classes for the past week and a half. She’s been busy and so have I; thus, we’ve been playing phone tag. Serious phone tag. The latest? She was just at the shooting range, practicing with an AK47, a rifle, and a shotgun.
She’s in heaven. After all, this is my mother, the one who’s an NRA card-toting member of the Democratic Party. Okay, maybe she doesn’t have the actual card, but she’s there in spirit. The first time she came to visit me in “the wilds of Idaho,” my then-boyfriend wanted us to take his gun with us to Sun Valley in case we broke down in the middle of nowhere. I refused. She accepted. I refused again, on the basis that I didn’t want to be around a loaded gun. She insisted. “You’ll never know it’s there,” she assured me, popped it into her purse, and off we sped to the swishy Sun Valley Lodge. The gun nestled happily in her purse all weekend long, amid rumpled Kleenex and hand lotion.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve shot guns, including an AK47 and an Uzi. But I’m really bad at it and to be frank, they scare me. She, quite obviously, doesn’t suffer the same qualms. That’s probably a good thing. And as one of her fellow trainees said, “I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark alley.”