We never had a gun in our home while I was growing up. My first experience with guns came when a classmate (middle school age?) invited me to come along on a bird hunt in the desert outside of Phoenix. Since I was not trained, I was not allowed to use, or even carry, one of the shotguns used to hunt for quails. What I was assigned to do was cary the dead birds around until we returned to our vehicles. This was bad enough, but even worse was some of them weren’t dead when they were added to my load, so they had their death throes in my arms. I was fully traumatized.

My next experience with guns was in NROTC and the Navy. Like everyone, I was trained in and had to “qualify” to use a 45 caliber service pistol. I was a really bad aim! During our 2nd Class midshipmen summer “cruise,” we spent three weeks with the Marine Corps in Little Creek, VA, during which we fired all sorts of weapons, including the famous M-16 rifle. The best part of the M-16 experience was the Marine instructor telling us that, “The M-16 was designed by a genius to be used by dummies.”

A couple of years later, while on my destroyer off the coast of Vietnam, we fired over 13,000 rounds of ammunition out of our 5″/38 caliber guns into North and South Vietnam. We only got about 5,000 rounds fired back at us, only two of which hit the ship (with no injuries). The report of 5″/38 caliber guns, in addition to being very loud when you’re close to them, is very sharp.

During most 4th of July fireworks shows, the mortars that are fired off during the finales are the exact same sound as those destroyer guns going off. We watched the fireworks this year from our boat at her mooring, and the fireworks were almost directly over us. I have to admit that the mortar explosions caused a visceral emotional response in me that I didn’t expect.

During my (half) circumnavigation on a sailboat in 2001, we were often asked if we carried guns to defend ourselves against the pirates in the Malacca Straits and the Gulf of Aden. We did not, for three reasons. The first was we figured that the pirates were a lot better at and more likely to use their guns than we were. The second was many countries require you to declare any weapons onboard when you check in to the country. Many of those countries confiscate those weapons, to be returned to you when you check out. Some of the countries we visited were groups of island stretching to hundreds of miles. Since we were sailing downwind around the world, that meant we checked in to the most windward island, and usually checked out in the most leeward island. To recover your weapons would have meant sailing all those miles back upwind, which we were in no way willing to do! Third, if you tried to hide your weapons and were caught, you were slammed into jail in invariably sketchy countries. This made it very easy to decide against carrying weapons on our boat. (I’ll save our pirate stories for another subject!)

So, overall, I don’t have a very good history with guns. Never have, and never will, own one.

I suppose most memorable family vacations have something that goes wrong.
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Booktalker – Remembering Sandra

During my working life I put up with a lot of teasing about whether I fit the stereotype of a librarian.   If it meant a stern old lady with her hair in a bun and her finger on her lips,   it wasn’t me.   And it surely wasn’t Sandra Payne  –  for starters,  Sandra wore her hair in dreadlocks.

When I met Sandra years ago she was Director of Young Adult Services at New York Public Library,  and I was a high school librarian working in the Bronx.   NYPL had a wonderful out-reach program to the schools,  including an annual book exhibit called Books for the Teen Age that we school librarians were invited to attend.  It was a great day talking books and connecting with library colleagues,  and I tried never to miss it.

We’d meet on a Saturday morning,  originally at the W 53rd Street Donnell Library that held NYPL’s YA collection,  and later when NYPL restructured their collections,  the exhibit was moved to the lovely Celeste Bartos Forum behind the Lions in the iconic 42nd St main building.

Sandra’s staff selected the titles for the year’s exhibit and the books were arranged by subject on tables in an area temporarily closed to the public.    We’d move from table to table,  pen and notebook in hand,  nibbling cookies and plowing our way through the collection,  noting the titles we’d like to order for our libraries.   At some point we’d break for lunch,  fanning out to midtown restaurants and coffee shops,  and then we’d head back to the books.

The list was well annotated and published every year as a very attractive booklet,  always with an artfully designed cover.   In fact students in the city high schools were invited to submit their artwork and the winning submission would grace that cover.   Sandra herself was an artist and I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea for the cover art contest was hers.

Then the following Saturday we were back at the library to hear Sandra and a panel of her YA librarians each expertly booktalk several titles from the book exhibit.

Throughout her life Sandra was immersed in the library,  literary and art worlds,  mentoring young librarians,  and promoting authors and artists especially African Americans who may not have been well known.   And she was an avid collector of books,  cards,  jewelry,  art,  and artifacts,  and as her Facebook friend I discovered she also loved birds posting the most beautiful,  colorful,  and unusual avian photos.

After she retired from NYPL Sandra kept her downtown Manhattan apartment,  but spent much of her time in St Louis where her mother and extended family lived.   Whenever she was back in New York she’d catch the art exhibits in town and lunch with her legions of friends.

Although one would never know it from Sandra’s wonderfully sunny outlook and her voracious appetite for life and art and books,  she was plagued with ill health.   She had been awaiting a kidney transplant and recently announced joyfully that it had been scheduled,  but tragically Sandra died last week from complications of that surgery.

May you rest in peace sweet,  unforgettable Sandra,  and may your memory be a blessing.

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

How shall I kill him? Poison knows ancient success, the weapon of choice for women, Shakespeare, and Russians. Guns are all-American. What shall it be? Poison? A gun? Maybe I should be thinking access — and egress — first, not weaponry. The West Wing boasts a dining room, a long cold room when empty. Could I morph into an eagle in one of those Americana paintings on the wall? Jab one of the arrows grasped in my talons into his back? No. His back and neck are too thick from all that golf. He wouldn’t even register the jabs. How about running a Go Fund Me drive on Facebook to raise money for a membership to Mar-a-Lago? Ridiculous. Let’s get real.

I’m a white male, went to a fancy school, I’ve been an actor. I’ve created characters before. I can do gauche. I could shape-shift into a cynical hedge fund guy, a greedy, exploitative record producer, or a former cocaine dealer who cashed out and went into straight business. I could open a Lamborghini dealership in Beverly Hills and cater to the same banished Saudi princes I’d sold coke to. A nod and a wink and I’d be part of the Mob-a-Lago.

Okay, with a preliminary access plan germinating, I need egress, most important — I’m certainly not going to sacrifice my life to liquidate this fat pustule. I call on a few old friends. Given their past victories and current enthusiasm, I trust their assurances. Post-production, they will be waiting for me. Thus assured, I can turn back to weaponry.

Poison is out: I have only the most elemental knowledge of chemistry.  I’ll buy a 3-D printer, download plans for a plastic pistol off the web, purchase a box of plastic bullets from Speer, and build una pistola.

With my newly coined mob credentials, I can maneuver an invitation to a Mar-a-Lago dinner with the Fat Boy. I will need to choke down the putrified steak or antibiotic chicken but then I will be able to approach his table during the mingle period between dinner and dessert. Or, luck might allow me to secure a seat across the table from him for as long as I can stand it. Then I’ll draw the plastic gun out of my cummerbund and shoot him in the throat. I’ll only have an instant to watch him grab his neck and choke on his blood, finally speechless. I’ll have to leap quickly to dodge the blood spurting across the while tablecloth, gorifying his shirt front, tedious red tie, and the people around him. Then I’ll make a dash for the mezzanine and out through the glass doors to the balcony, where a helicopter, arranged by a coterie of aging Weathermen who used the same technique to sweep the psychedelic guru Timothy Leary out of prison, will secret me away.

They’ll have to violate federal airspace, hovering above the tile roof while I evade the disinterested Secret Service, race up the stairs to the mezzanine, and emerge onto the balcony unscathed. There, I’ll leap into the waiting ‘copter and we’ll flutter below the radar to Key Largo, where I transfer to a smuggler’s cigarette boat. The driver and navigator will proceed so swiftly, the sleek craft will leap from wave crest to crest, landing me 90 minutes later at the remote end of Veradero beach, just outside Havana. Thanks to my willful, calculating rage, the advent of the 3-D printer, and a love for Key Largo, I should survive to know with satisfaction that I have killed the worst President in history.

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*This post excerpted and revised from a desperate screed I wrote during the dark days of 2019.