In last edition’s Happy Trails, I mentioned the Christmas classic movie A Christmas Story. Despite the numerous holiday movies in which family disaster occurs, this movie came to mind for two reasons. First, it’s one of my favorites. Second, I knew what this edition’s Happy Trails was going to be then, which is a rarity, as I tend not to know what I’m writing about until the day before I NEED to put something down on paper. That’s just a side note, though, to this story.
Yes, A Christmas Story is second in line after National Lampoons Christmas Vacation on my Favorite Holiday Movie List. I love it from start to finish and everything in between. The kid getting his tongue frozen to the flagpole, the use of the words “Oh, fudge,” and, of course, probably the most famous line: “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
But for as much as I love this movie, I never stood behind that last line or the idea of it. How can anyone shoot their eye out with a bb gun! I found the notion impossible. Even the most careless of people know not to look into the business end of any explosive/projectile instrument, which was the only way I could ever figure someone stood a chance of “shooting their eye out.” However, I was forgetting throughout my entire childhood and almost all my teen years one important aspect: the ricochet factor.
When I was in high school, I had a friend, Mike, who moved to the US from Puru when he was 10. Because of educational discrepancies between the two countries, Mike was held back a year upon entering the US school system, therefore making him almost an entire year older than any of us. I became friends with Mike early freshman year, and throughout most of high school, the age difference between me and my other friends and Mike didn’t matter worth a darn. We hardly paid any attention to it or recognized it. What did age matter really? Well, it ended up mattering a lot about a month before Mike was set to turn 18, while the rest of us were slogging slowly through our never-ending, constricting seventeenth year on this earth. My gosh, will the world turn already, so I can move on with my life? I thought. Mike turning 18 was like light at the end of the tunnel. Better than that, he was a full-out all-access pass. We could live vicariously through him. And because I inducted him into our circle of friends, I had first dibs to his liberties.
The day after he turned 18, Mike and I went on an unbridled shopping spree, flashing his legitimate ID around like it was the very key that released him/us from prison. I’ll spare you the details of where we went and what we bought, but it ended in front of a bb gun rack at a local sporting goods store.
Mike chose a real-looking spring-action bb/dart gun that came with a small dartboard, which we only paid cursory attention to, as we had no intentions of shooting at it. I selected a less-than-real-looking (but much more powerful) CO2 powered handgun.
The clerk at the register was no problem. As we’d witnessed the whole day, Mike just flash his ID and, “Here you go boys, enjoy!”
And so we did.
In minutes, we were shooting whatever we could find to shoot behind the sporting goods store in the shipping/receiving area.
As kids do, we grew bored … of shooting at boxes and other trash, so we called it a fun day and went home. No casualties.
Mike ultimately ended up hanging the dartboard in his room and made good use of it while he lay on his bed and talked on the phone with friends, shooting darts: Phone in one hand, fake .45 in the other, lounging on the bed like an adolescent, foreign Scarface.
My gun didn’t come with a dartboard or any target, so I opted for a sawhorse and some pop cans and turned my parents’ basement into a shooting range. My parents didn’t know about the bb gun, by the way.
I mentioned before in an earlier Happy Trails that I’m a terrible shot. This is very true. From only 15 feet away, I couldn’t hit one of those cans. I hit everything else, especially the sawhorse. With a fresh CO2 cartridge in the gun, the bbs had no problem penetrating the wood of the sawhorse and sticking there. But as the CO2 pressure lessened, the bbs started to ricochet. Ignoring this, I zeroed in on one can, took a breath, and put all my concentration into blasting the thing away. I pulled the trigger, and same as always, the bb flew low, hit the sawhorse, but instead of bouncing away, it came right back at me, where I’d been kneeling.
I had time to literally see the bb right in my line of sight, which meant it was headed straight for my eyeball. It was kind of like watching the world’s smallest cannon ball flying toward you. This all happened in the matter of a split second, but I not only registered what was about to happen but I also had just enough time to move my face slightly. The bb ended up grazing me just to the left of my left eye, although I flung myself back like I had just been shot with an M-16. And all the while, despite how fast everything happened, I slowly heard the words in my mind: “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
Boy, no kidding. I didn’t expect that.
I’d like to say that my days with the bb gun ended there, but I was 18 and had people to impress, especially myself, so … you figure it out.
The gun did go missing after a while, which meant my father found it. It didn’t resurface again until years later, when my wife and I were at my parents’ cottage and I was rummaging through some boxes in the shed, where I found the bb gun and a box of CO2 cartridges. I pulled it out, dusted it off, cleaned it, loaded it, and took aim at the softest surface I could find. And when my wife asked me if she could shoot it, I said, not knowing she was an expert shot with a real gun, let alone a bb gun, “Careful, you might shoot your eye out.”
