I'm late to the party -- again. This statement will make more sense at the end of my post.
Earliest memory is finding a high brass Remington Express at the edge of my Grand-father's farm lane. I was four years old, no lie. My grand-mother emptied the contents to my howling displeasure, but the hull remained a treasure for years, along with the spent casings and rabbit tails my Grand-father saved for me after upland hunts. There are still a half dozen of the green Rem. Expresses he never fired on my bedroom dresser. Dad got me a junior license at ten, and I carried a single shot .16 ga.Iver Johnson hammer gun for two years. My twelfth birthday saw a new Stevens 20 ga. double. I hated it. It was as heavy as lead and swung like a fence post. Besides, it wasn't a REAL gun. A REAL gun was a 12 ga. cannon like all the grown-ups carried. I graduated to a real .12 ga. double at sixteen, my Father's old Nitro Special that he no longer used. I carried a gun in the field until I was twenty -grouse, rabbits, pheasants. I didn't carry a gun afield again for thirty-eight years. Four years ago I discovered the joy of doubles and upland hunting again. Found an old 16 ga. Flues I liked, then a Fox 16 ga.; two more 16s, a 1909 Sauer and a '44 Sauer have joined them, along with a Belgium guild hammer-gun .16. I still have the Iver Johnson and the Lefever Nitro. What I don't have is youth and the thirty-eight years I let slip away. Regret is too soft a word. But from this vantage point, when the horizon in front is nearer than the one to the rear, appreciation is heightened for a great many things that escape youth. I am indebted also, to several members of this board -- Jeff G., Bill G., Uplander, Bill C. -- for comradeship and friendship and a generosity of spirit not so easy to find in society at large.
I told you I came late to the party. Better late than never.
