Took the 6 year old grandson to the range with me this morning and he shot his way through a half bag of balloons with the BB gun. Then he said, “Let’s go shoot some clay birds.” The range I belong to has an area where you can throw your own pasture clays and since he’s turned 6 I’ve started letting him trap for me. NaNa always packs a bag of snacks and cool drinks for us so we drove over there, sat on the tailgate and ate and talked about “stuff” before unloading the trap.

For a long time I’ve had a short LOP hammer single ejector (16ga) in the back of the safe waiting for the day one of the grandkids was ready. He’s not yet but I decided to pull it out and shoot a few with it this morning to let him see it and start asking about it. I make him sit on the tailgate and pull the trap from there so I don’t have to keep an eye on where he is. After the first bird, I “aimed” the breech so the shell ejected into the back of the truck. He immediately jumped up, retrieved it and seeing a little smoke stuck it up to his nose.

“What’s that?”

“It’s gun powder.” I said.

“Well, PaPa, I LOVE the smell of that!”

It’s been a hard stretch with the loss of our younger son earlier this year and just the instant honesty and purity of that exclamation was, as I said above, priceless.