While I've had so much free time over the past several days, besides reading a few books I've done some painful reminiscing.
One of the painful memories was of a Psychology 101 class I took in the Winter of 1963/64 at a Community College in Eastern Oregon
The instructor was an actual practicing Psychologist, who was teaching the class as a way to augment his income.
(There isn't much of a 'practice' for a Psychologist in Eastern Oregon. In a community composed of farmer and wheat ranchers, most of his prospective customers didn't go looking for a Psychologist when they found themselves in a Mid-life Crisis. They just went out to the field and drove a combine for 12 or 18 hours while worrying about how they were going to pay for the combine, then went home to bed as the best way they could think of to kill time until they could get back in the saddle for the next day of harvest.)
My father was a millwright, and had about the same attitude toward psychological crises as his neighbors. But he also ran a small gun shop in this garage where he converted military rifles -- usually a 1903-A3 -- into the latest hot wildcat caliber and put a beautiful custom stock on it, then let me shoot it long enough to sight it in and fall in love with it ... his eyes weren't any better than mine are now ... and then he sold the
sonovabitch out from under me to some rich wheat rancher who was going through a mid-life crisis and just HAD to have the latest hot-rocket wildcat caliber
Cadillac of a rifle.
Pop spent most of his evenings in his gun shop, usually talking to prospective customers. He did the work on the weekends, when we weren't out varmint shooting. A lot of his week-night company didn't really have the money to buy a Burnett Special, but they dearly loved to talk about guns.
One of that category ... came out to talk at least once a week, never bought anything ... was this Psychologist. I can't remember his name now, but I saw him there for a year before I took the Psychology class and I was only surprised when I got to my first night at the class and saw who the teacher was. I had no idea that he was a teacher or a Psychologist, and it was two or three weeks into the class before I realized he was A Professional Man. I had never to my knowledge met anyone with a college degree, and I was surprised that this guy actually had a Masters. But I was unimpressed by the guy. He had a walleye, and in class you couldn't tell who he was looking at. Helluva nice guy, but I had never given him a second thought when I saw him in
Pop's gun shop. I figured him for just another working stiff, like the farmers and mechanics I saw every night as I tried to make myself small in the corner of the shop so I could listen to the talk of these Real and Not-So-Real Men.
About halfway through the Psychology class, this Not-So-Real-Man, the Psychology 101 teacher, started to talk about how our life experiences color the way we see the world.
As an example, he suggested
"What happens when you shoot a gun?"Then he pointed to me, sitting in the front row as if I was an eager student, and asked me to answer the question.
He had never spoken a word to me before that moment, in the shop or in class,and I never had spoken to him. It was as if he had pushed the
GO button and I was an automaton. Entirely unrehearsed, I began to speak with the determination to give the best explanation I could provide about a phenomenon which I could address with some authority.
"When you pull the trigger of a firearm, you release the stored energy of a compressed spring which impels a sharpened rod known as the 'firing pin' forward. The firing pin strikes a primer on the base of the cartridge with sufficient momentum to dent the soft metal, driving the cup of the primer against an inverted cone and compressing the primer medium, which is highly sensitive to impact, between the cup and the cone. The primer medium ignites under this condition and this fiery gas is injected into the body of the cartridge through a 'flash hole' in the base of the cartridge."
I went on to describe the components of the primer medium and compare it with the 'explosive' (or "fast burning") properties of the gunpowder, the rapid but controlled expansion of gasses, pushing the bullet or shot charge down the barrel, the effect of rifling on a bullet ... in short, I provided enough detail description of the process to take up two or three minutes of extemporaneous discussion about
exactly what happens when you pull the trigger of a firearm.
Nobody said a thing while I was talking, and after the teacher was sure I was done he nodded his head and pointed to someone else.
Someone who hadn't fallen asleep during my speech.
"What happens when you pull the trigger on a gun?"I'm sure the teacher chose the next person as carefully as he had chosen me, because the answer he received was:
"The gun goes bang, a bullet either hits the deer or misses it". Or words to that effect. No more, probably less.
That was the moment when I realized I was
A Geek. No, I didn't have the word for it ... only several years later did I understand that a pedantic over-
explainer could be defined by a single word ... but I knew. I knew.
Fortunately, by this time I was familiar with the phenomenon of personal embarrassment. This was just the first time it didn't involve kissing a girl in a public place. But that's another story.
