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Cristina, my dad’s caregiver for several years, was thoroughly cleaning his house recently when she made a surprising discovery. My wife received her frantic call.

“There’s a gun under the bed!  I think it’s loaded!  What should I do?!”

“Call John. Give the gun to John.”

John lives nearby, is married to my first wife, and has a gun collection.   I’ve been told John never hunts, but for many years he has enjoyed practicing at a gun range every week.

John came by to pick up the shotgun.  My dad had hidden it under his bed for protection even though he had no training with guns. For years, however, he had been sleeping on a reclining chair in his living room in front of a large screen TV. When I lived with Dad for three months last year I slept in his bed. I had completely forgotten about the shotgun directly beneath me. Dad hadn’t mentioned it to me in more than thirty years.

I’ve had only two personal experiences with guns.  The first was when I was thirteen and a friend brought his BB gun to my house.  We decided that one of us would extend an arm holding a bottle – and the other would shoot at it.  After a few hours my parents discovered us, in effect, shooting at each other on the vacant lot in front of our house. They were horrified.

“Stop that immediately!  You could put someone’s eye out!”

That was the end of my youthful gun fun.

When I was twenty-nine my first wife and I took a cruise, from Los Angeles to Acapulco.  On one of the days at sea a member of the crew ran a shooting contest on the stern of the main deck.  I joined in.

He would pull a lever catapulting a clay target far into the air.  The passenger would aim the shotgun at the target and pull the trigger.  It seemed like great fun – until it was my turn.

I tried to follow the rising clay target through the gun sight, but never seemed to be successful with my aim as the target moved swiftly to my right.  Finally, just as the target began falling toward the sea, I pulled the trigger.  Blam!

Had I waited one second longer to shoot I would have hit the crewman directly in the face, and yet he had done nothing to warn me!  My hands were shaking as, I handed back the last gun I would ever touch. That was fifty years ago.

We all have life experiences that mark us, consciously or unconsciously, for the rest of our lives, and this is one of mine.  With hindsight, I realize that at the age of thirteen, and also at twenty-nine, I thought my judgment was very good.  Maybe it was, but not when it came to guns.

I’m glad my dad, in the dead of night, never had to try to find his gun and shoot at someone. That someone could very well have been another unintended victim – quite possibly me.

Alan

Now that I’m not watching news on TV, there are only a few programs I record so I can view them at my leisure — and fast forward through the commercials.  One of those is America’s Got Talent.  And, indeed, America does have a great deal of talent. In the preliminary rounds, however, the talent ranges from OMG entrancing to, shall we say, erratic.  And there is always Simon Cowell, creator of the show and one of the four judges, who often adds a cynical edge to the proceedings.

Midway through one preliminary show a twelve-year-old girl was singing her heart out when Simon interrupted.

“Stop!” he practically shouted.  She was startled.  “The sound track you’re singing over is horrible.  Absolutely rotten,” he said.

The girl didn’t know what he wanted, or how to proceed, so she ran to the side of the stage.  I couldn’t tell if she was going to regroup, or abandon her singing career, perhaps forever.

Then, almost offstage, she said to herself, “Well, that just happened.”  Then she turned around and marched right back to the center of the stage.

“Start your song again, please.  This time acapella.  No soundtrack,” Simon said.

After a brief pause, she began the song again, and she sang well.  She sang so well that each of the four judges, including Simon, voted her into the next round.

We each have moments, such as this, which are turning points.  In one of my favorite plays, The Rainmaker, the deputy sheriff is divorced and lonely.  In perhaps the most poignant line of the play he says that when his wife was walking out he knew that if he just told her he needed her and asked her to stay, she would.  But he was ashamed to ask.

In the movie We Bought a Zoo the father is counseling his teenage son about asking a girl to go on a date.  “You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage,” he says, as he tells his son about the first time he saw the boy’s mother sitting in a coffee shop.

Whether it’s living in the moment as with the young singer, an opportunity to be vulnerable and speak your truth as with the deputy sheriff, or twenty seconds of insane courage that the father shared with his teenage son, at pivotal times we all face a wonderful chance disguised as a scary choice.

In these moments it’s easy to flinch and miss the best opportunity of a career, or for a loving relationship.

Or, we can follow the example of the twelve-year-old singer. We can forget what seems to be rejection as well as our own fear, live in the moment, and recognize, as she did, “Well, that just happened.”  And then move on.

We might remember the words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his first inaugural address delivered in the midst of the Great Depression.  FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Alan