The Force

...Red Five - you switched off your targeting computer...

According to Wikipedia, I'm nearly blind without my glasses.

I'd like to blame genetics for this as every single member of my immediate family... and most of my extended family ~ at least on Dad's side ~ also need to wear glasses.

Thick ones, mostly.

So reasonably, it's Dad's fault. Probably had very little to do with being both bookish and lazy in my youth, reading with my head actually resting on the page ~ in crappy lighting.

I got my first pair of glasses in the spring, after I'd turned 11 years old. That's a great age to get glasses; allows for all kinds of abuse from your fellow inmates in grade 6; but i decided on the ride home from the optometrist's the next town over that that paled in comparison to being able to see that the mountains weren't just covered in a green carpet - that there were individual trees out there.

And, to be honest, actually catching a ball before it hit me in the face was pretty good too. That took some practice, though.

In fact - the frisbee I caught with my upper lip the other day is proof of that.

So, that summer, now that I could see and all, Dad decided it was time I learned to shoot. He took me out to the local rifle range out in the bush off the highway, set up some beer cans, and taught me on an open-site, bolt action .22 rifle that he had. I think it was the same one Granddad had taught him with. Uncle Crazy Legs would know.

Eventually, that .22 became the board for one of our favorite camping games.

Please note when I say "camping," I mean that, in my youth, camping in no way involved anything so civilized as reservations, serviced sites, overnight fees, outhouses or paved roads. I have since found most of those places on maps, but the cars I drive would never get there.

Dad was a School Principal, and had 8 weeks of down time in the summer. He was also an avid Outdoorsman, and would decompress more easily if the only suggestion of civilization was the occasional contrail in the sky - if that.

So, we'd sit off to one end of our camp, set up like a proper range - Dad was an accredited B.C. Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Instructor - and stick Calgary Export Bottlecaps in a tree some 20 yards out and sit in lawn chairs and try to knock them out of the tree with .22 longs.

A couple summers of this and I started to give him a little run for his money. We had a point system worked out using the concentric coloured circles on the caps - we used that brand as they looked like little targets.

We were in the Flathead valley the summer I finally bested him. He laughed and told me I was becoming a hell of a good shot. "It's not really fair, though," he admitted.

Well, obviously I had to ask.

He said that he noticed as he progressed through his 40s that he now needed to get new glasses - probably bifocals - as the ball of the open site would disappear as he aimed.

I was incredulous. "Then how is it you scored better than last year?"

He just smiled and said "The Force."

That year for Hallowe'en he dressed like Obi-Wan Kenobi for his elementary school. He looked brilliantly like Alec Guiness in the role - even though he was much more Darth Vader shaped.