Go Get My Gun

That’s where I grew up, the little white house just barely visible in the top right hand corner.

In the spring of 1978, around the time my brother was born, my parents bought a place in the country several miles outside Bardstown. They’d lived in town for five years, having moved there from Paducah, my mother’s hometown, for my dad’s teaching job at city’s high school.

My dad fell in the love with the plot nearby too, something had spoken to him there. I would be a place he could find peace in moments of anxiety.

After they divorced, he kept the nearby plot and still returns there—and as I type this he is likely there meditating, drinking coffee, ruminating of the meaning of life. About a year after moving in, the Iranian Revolution took place. An event thousands of miles away would have a lasting impact on our family. And for a brief moment, in addition to the embassy seizure, it caused an energy crisis that shook America.

Lines at gas stations were long. People’s lives were tailored around when and where to get gasoline for their family vehicles. Instances of theft, siphoning from cars parked in driveways, people driving off without paying, were not uncommon.

One night, in the middle of the energy crisis, my older brother, who was still an infant, was having difficulty breathing. Often, when this occurred, one of my parents would sit outside with him to let him breath in the fresh country air. They would do this even in the winter. It was something folks did back then, and they still may. I suppose the air’s fresher there as opposed to the still air of my neighborhood in Washington, DC.

The view from the porch into the barnyard.

This time around, it was my father’s turn. As my dad was sitting on our large front porch, he heard something rustling in the garage across the road that sat about 50 yards away from our front door. Under a full moon, night time visibility in that valley where my mom continues to live is still quite good. But on this night there was very little illumination from the moon and the security light from the barn lot another 100 yards away provided little assistance at the garage, so my dad had to strain to see what the commotion was. After initially dismissing it as some varmint from the near-by woods, my father saw the shadows of two men moving about in the garage.

Now his senses were on full alert. He was holding his youngest (at the time, I came a few years later), my brother, and his wife and oldest child were inside.

“I was nervous,” he explained to me a few years ago. “I’m holding Jacob, your mother and Meena were inside. And these two were rustling around in our garage.”

Dealing with the same visibility issues that hamstrung my father, they either hadn’t noticed my dad on the porch or didn’t care enough to do so. Thinking on his feet and taking a larger gamble than he probably should have, my dad decided on one of the biggest bluffs of his life.

“JANE! GO GET MY GUN,” he yelled.

Then he stomped his feet as loud as he could have on our wooden porch. Almost instantaneously, the two figures in the garage dropped whatever metal vessels they had with them for carrying the gas they were planning on siphoning from my parent’s cars. And before the containers hit the ground they were scurrying away, reversing their path to our garage. Kicking up dust in their midst. Gravel and asphalt crackling under the their footfalls.

The thing is my dad did not have a gun, nor has ever owned one. Even to this day, my mother does not allow guns in the house, not because of this story though. This ban, at one time, extended to water guns and any toy weapon that looked like a gun. But that’s for another story.

“I took a huge gamble. What if they had a weapon? What if they were wanting to do more than just steal our gasoline? Maybe I should have let them. I just reacted,” my father explained a few years ago.

The bottom line is people do funny things in the middle of a crisis. My dad bluffed his way to not having an empty tank when he tried to go to work the next morning. Those would be gas stealers just wanted to get away without having to pay to fill their tanks up—they probably could not afford to. It could have all gone differently for everyone.

Thankfully, it didn’t.