49 bullseyes!!

I kid you not, gang.

And only my second time shooting.

I have no clue where this sudden skill has come from. But I am still so new to it, that, at first, I loaded the bullets in backwards and needed an instructor to come over and help me figure out why the gun wouldn’t fire…

I feel for certain, though, that I channel my birth dad on that shooting range. (If you are new to the blog, I had a very intense and brief relationship with my birth dad. He was 15 years older than me. I met him in 1988 and he died in 1999. He was career-Navy — and a Navy SEAL in Vietnam throughout that war. He eventually retired to the desert in Nevada. We had a ton of “unfinished business” when he died because he did not tell me he was dying, he simply stopped speaking to me. And then he was gone.)

He sort of comes into my brain when I am aiming at the target — in a good way. I can feel him helping me shoot. It was like that a couple weeks ago, too, when I went to the shooting range for the first time.

And then, today — I went into the shooting range with Johnny Cash singing in my head because I had been playing “Folsom Prison Blues” in the car on my way over.

But once I was on the range, bullets loaded correctly, aiming at the target and thinking of my birth dad, suddenly the Everly Brothers started singing in my head: “Darling you can count on me/ ’til the sun dries up the sea…” and then I had bullseye after bullseye. With my birth dad — and that song — singing in my head.

And I have not listened to that song in ages.

It was very intense.

Anyway. I feel a little stunned but my day off has been just splendid.

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