All this discussion about gun violence has gotten me thinking about guns in my own life. My first close encounter happened when I was in junior high, living in Memphis in an apartment on Pigeon Perch Lane with my mom and younger sister.
My mother had gone off for a getaway and hired a woman she knew to stay with us, fix our meals, drive us wherever, and provide responsible adult supervision.
My sister and I didn’t know this woman well, and I don’t think my mother did either. I don’t even remember her name and have only a hazy memory of her hair, a helmet of tight blonde curls that one gets at the beauty parlor and keeps for a week. She herself seemed a bit tight, with pursed lips and a hard body, not really the motherly type. Nevertheless, off went my mom, leaving us in her care.
Our surrogate parent stayed in my mother’s bedroom, which felt very odd and invasive. The apartment just didn’t like home; it felt like we were sharing our home with a stranger.
One day when this lady was out of the apartment, I went into my mom’s bedroom to grab a tissue from the Kleenex box beside her bed. To my shock, my hand touched a cold metal object that turned out to be a handgun. I could not have been more surprised if a rattlesnake had popped out of the box.
Naturally, I took the gun out and handled it. I had the good sense not to point it at myself and to steer clear of the trigger. The gun felt much heavier than it looked. Handling it felt both thrilling and terrifying.
I felt relieved when I stowed it back in the tissue box, but then I felt nervous the rest of her stay, knowing it was there, likely to go off at the slightest touch.
I told my sister about the gun and cautioned her to stay away. We both felt suddenly afraid in our home, now that a gun had entered the apartment.
I kept imagining this lady reaching for a tissue in the night, half asleep, and firing a bullet through the wall into our bedroom.
Not only did I now feel unsafe in our apartment, I wondered if the neighborhood was actually dangerous and that this woman knew it, but my mother didn’t. In any case, her gun hinted at a violent world of which I was blissfully ignorant until now. Her fear transmitted itself to us through her gun.
When my mother returned, my sister and I rushed to tell her about the gun as soon as our caretaker left, the way kids do when they are outraged and indignant by something their baby sitter has done. My mother was furious and horrified. Her reaction confirmed what I’d felt: that bringing a gun into our home was a bad idea.
So life returned to normal, but it took a few days before I could enter my mom’s bedroom or look at that tissue box and not remember the gun. And though I’ve lived in some scary neighborhoods over the years, I never once thought of buying a gun. Maybe because my first encounter with a gun made me feel afraid, not safe.
