Seeking Authentic Voice

In 1968 my fifth grade class went camping for a couple of days at the end of the school year to mark the transition from elementary school to  middle school. It was on this camping trip that I learned to shoot a rifle. They taught me how to load it, aim and shoot it, and clean it. In the 1980’s my dad worked in Puerto Rico but frequently travelled to Salt Lake City, sometimes with a lay-over in Chicago, where I lived. On one of these visits he had a duffel bag that he put through the checked baggage at the airport so it could go on to Salt Lake City while he stayed with me for a few days. The duffle bag contained some rifles and guns, used mostly for hunting, that he was transporting back to Utah. A friend of his was going to pick it up at baggage claim. I was shocked, but apparently it was no big deal, then. But, can you imagine anyone doing that today? Many years ago when Dan’s father died Dan inherited his father’s World War II era gun. I wasn’t thrilled with the ide...

I grew up practicing drills in school. The alarm would sound and we would all scramble to the floor, hunch under our desks, knees bunched up, and our arms over our heads. Air raid drills for the next event of nuclear war fare.I grew up with the real potential for mass killing. Any day it was possible. Nuclear testing took place not far from where I grew up, the winds blowing from the western desert region of Utah carried the residue of toxic, cancer causing, waste. The potential for a nuclear bomb was real to us. Then the drill practices and that kind of thinking stopped. I don't remember when, how, or why. Maybe it's because I moved away from the west? When I was ten we moved to Wisconsin. When I was fourteen we moved to Texas. Then, when I was fifteen my family moved to Chicago, a city that became my home for forty years. The first twenty-some years I lived in Chicago I took public transportation everywhere. I would ride buses and trains late at night and early in the ...