The cannons they will rattle and the blazing bullets fly
(LJ ate my last post on the subject -- I'll try again...)
I took a handgun safety class recently. It was... diverting. Vastly diverting, I do assure you. It did away with much of my instinctive horror of firearms, which have always given me the same feeling as snakes: I'd better watch my step or they'll bite me. However, I've got an unrequited wish to learn to shoot with a black-powder musket or antique rifle, and I figured I'd better get the safety-and-handling part under my belt first.
The class was six hours long, one of those deals where you get all the instruction over in one huge session. The first bit was rather dull, going over and over the safety rules. However, we needed those for Step Two, wherein all eight of us students picked up unloaded firearms and got to try holding them safely and dry-firing them at a wall. We used semiautomatic pistols, big heavy ugly chunks of metal with slides that stick out the back. One of the lesser-known safety secrets of pistol firing is that you have to keep your thumb out of the way of the slide, lest it snap shut on you. (Actually, I remember seeing that pointed out in a Tim Powers novel somewhere. Powers is a writer who notices details, especially as they apply to hand injuries.)
Then we put on ear and eye protection and went into the range. It is a long room, divided into lanes, much like a bowling alley. At the far end, there are paper targets hanging up in front of an artificial waterfall which flows down over a soft lead surface. The water is there to keep lead dust out of the air.
Well, we loaded the magazines with little brass bullet cartridges (a bit like Pez dispensers) and slotted them into our guns. Then, on the instructor's signal, we all blazed away at the targets. It's scary, lemme tellya, firing off your first shot with a pistol. You hold it up -- and damn, but it weighs a lot! -- and look through the sight at the target. You clamp your finger on the trigger harder and harder, until you wonder whether it isn't going to fire after all. Then there is a huge explosion, and the pistol jumps in your hand, a burst of smoke gushes out of it, and the spent brass cartridge-cover flies loose and bounces off your goggles. I have to admit I love the smell of gunpowder smoke. Target shooting is scary, and it's a rush, too. I managed not to shriek or faint, and eventually I got to the point where I could fire off five shots in a row and actually hit the paper the target was printed on. Actual markswomanship will have to wait until I have unwound a bit more.
Last Saturday, I visited my friends A. and J. for a meeting of the Single Malt and Song Society, their monthly singaround and drinking party. I'm not that much of a drinker, but I love the songs and I love the company. It's great when I can fall about screaming with laughter at a joke and nobody thinks I'm weird for it. I had been a little isolated all week, so was more than normally geared up to be goofy and have fun. A. and J.'s cats provide an index to the character of their household in general: there is a big orange tomcat named Tallisker and a very small, low-slung, short-legged, long-furred, shy cat named Isla (=brands of single malt whiskey). Isla is so very short that she brushes the floor with her belly-fur; her humans thought of naming her Roomba but changed their minds at the last minute.
Hey, said the little low-slung cat,
I'll tell you the reason that,
The reason that I brush the floor:
I lost the Tom that I adore...
Oh, and I had a lovely surprise. At the sing were two women, one tall and dignified and one short and giggly. They flabbergasted me by singing "How stands the glass around?", also known as General Wolfe's March. It is an obscure but stately drinking song, known to have been sung in camp before the Battle of Quebec, and till I met these women I'd thought I was the only person still performing it. Turns out they're both living-history buffs who reenact battles from the Seven Years' War and the Revolution.
How stands the glass around?
For shame! ye take no care, my boys.
How stands the glass around?
Let mirth and wine abound.
The trumpets sound!
The colors flying are, my boys,
To fight, kill or wound;
May we still be found
Content with our hard lot, my boys,
On the cold, cold ground.
*off to brush my shako*