Lost and found

Eight hundred-dollar bills and one Smith & Wesson.

One of the advantages of finally going through boxes I packed up 3 1/2 years ago when we moved to Woodland Hills is that I found a few things I'd been wondering about, and some things I didn't know I had.

The eight hundred-dollar bills were spread between 4 envelopes given to Rob and me by my dad.  The cash was what he used to call "WAM" which stood for "Walking-Around Money."  (Funny, until this moment, when I actually had to write out the word "WAM" I thought it was spelled "WHAM" but that doesn't make sense, does it?)

More important, though, than the WAM were the poems that accompanied it.  Each Easter and Christmas, he would write customized poems that he termed "topical."  He would work in whatever events or activities or funny stories that had just happened in our lives.  And the rhyming was painfully and admittedly awful.  I noticed that in his last Christmas poem, he had the audacity to rhyme the name "Johnny Cash" with, yes, the word "cash."  That was his idea of a perfect (meaning funny) rhyme.  I had no idea that any WAM still existed, so that was a nice surprise.  But the poems were the real treasure.  Someday I'll assemble them all into a blog post.

Along with the found WAM was daughter Emily's gun.  This was also a gift from my dad.  For several years, he and Emily attended the Civil War Institute in the summers at Gettysburg.  My dad had loved the Civil War and had, through uncle Jack, befriended the head of the Institute, Gabor Boritt.  It was through this love of the Civil War and of Gettysburg that Em decided to go to college there and eventually she became Gabor's research assistant and also worked for the Institute's summer program.

But I digress.  Back to the gun.  It's a Smith & Wesson Model One and a Half.  A 7 shot 32 rimfire second issue, made around 1868.  We know it's second issue by its round barrel, fluted cylinder, birds head grip, and serial number of 125297.  I googled it to make sure.

Dad bought the gun while he and Emily were in Gettysburg for CWI, with Emily attending on a student scholarship.  She was staying in the dorm.  Dad was in a hotel.  That night, he woke up at 1 AM with a terrifying thought - what if Emily is caught having a gun in the dorm?!!!  He promptly woke up one of the CWI employees who agreed to track Emily down and let her know the problem.  That employee rushed to Em's room.  No Em.

Turns out that Miss Em was participating in a "Ghost Tour" of Gettysburg.  Normally she would have avoided the ghost tour at all costs, just as she would have avoided ghosts.  But evidently she was trying to be a good sport and went along.

The employee had to drive around Gettysburg in the middle of the night to see if he could find the ghost tour's whereabouts.  He eventually found them and walked up to the group and asked if Emily was there.  This, of course, scared her even more than the ghosts ever could.

The employee explained the situation and Emily gave him the key to her room so he could remove the gun and give it to my dad.  For safe-keeping.  The thought of my dad having a gun scared me even more.  I grew up with the story of him finding a gun as a child and playing with it all day while he was sick in bed, only to have it go off and shoot a hole in his bedroom wall.  That story does not fade from this daughter's memory very easily....

Somehow they got the gun from Gettysburg to our family reunion in Vail, Colorado.  I'm grateful that neither of them thought to put it in their carry-ons.  So I guess it rode successfully in their regular bags.  In the lobby of the hotel, dad was telling the story to assorted relatives.  At the end of the story one of them said, so where's the gun now?  Dad said, right here on the coffee table!  It was wrapped in bubble wrap but he had placed it in plain sight in the middle of the coffee table and none of us knew it.  I mentally added up the number of children that had passed by that table in the time we spent there and then tried not to let that number cause me to yell at my dad in public at a family reunion.  Fortunately for all involved, no blood was shed in the lobby that day.

When the gun arrived in the Hummel house, I took one look at it and thought - there's no way I'm letting my 16 year old daughter have this in her room.  So I took it.  For safe-keeping.

I stored it in the back of my dresser, thinking that the drawer was so stuffed with junk that no one would ever find it.  Also, I have to admit that I did consider the gun would definitely come in handy if there was ever an intruder.

Later, during our move, it got packed up, bubble wrap and all.  Frankly, the first time I saw it I was so afraid of it that I barely looked at it.  But when I discovered it the other day, I was amazed at how small it was.  Barely 6 1/2 inches from barrel tip to the end of the birds head grip.  It fits my hand perfectly.  Heavy but not too much so.  I compared its color, rivets, cylinder length, serial number to what I could find online.  I have it sitting next to my computer right now and I can't keep my hands off it.  Though I have to admit, I keep it pointed away from me and those I love.

In googling it, I found myself on all sorts of gun websites and 99.9% of it scares the #%&$ out of me.  But this gun is different.  It was made just a couple of years after the Civil War ended.  It looks like a ladies gun, and I imagine that those were not easy times and a gun might mean the survival of your family.  That this gun might have belonged to a Civil War widow and might have brought her some measure of comfort with her husband gone.  Maybe that widow might have walked the steps of the U.S. Pension Bureau building in Washington DC to plead for the pension money that would have been owed to her dead husband, in the building that now is the National Building Museum where Emily once interned.

That's what I truly adore about this story.  It goes from love to fear (lots of it!) and back to love again.  My dad's love of history led to the gun which then led to my dad's fear of the gun in the dorm.  That fear led to increased fear on the ghost tour, later to fear in a hotel lobby, and then to fear in my own home.  But now I hold that Smith & Wesson Model One and a Half and think only of the love that drew my dad and my daughter together in a shared love of history.  How proud he would be to know that his CWI buddy was acknowledged in two of Gabor's books, was an intern in a Civil War pension building, and later completed her Masters in "public history."

I guess it's time.  Em, you can have your gun back.  You earned it.  Now, if only I could find the cannon ball dad gave to Claire.  It might come in handy if I need to defend myself...