The Accidental Rifle
I knew my grandmother could not possibly have meant to have sent me the gun, but there it was in my living room.
She meant to send me a Polaroid camera. I have some pictures she took with it in the 70s: in one, my brother and I are standing on top of our picnic table in racing shorts, and you can see my Mom’s green Datsun and my shiny purple bike with the silver-striped banana seat in the background. The camera, its white plastic body and rainbow stripe, was also in my living room.
Both items were packed with crushed up newspapers. Now for the camera, this made sense. For the Beretta, the only thing worse than it coming in the mail at all was it coming cushioned with crunched up papers and Wal-Mart fliers.
I decided to call my grandmother. I asked her, “Did you mean to send me two boxes?” No, she did not. “That’s good,” I told her, “because I would be worried if the gun was from you.”
Now, my grandmother is going to be 80 this fall, and she is quite sharp. She still drives, and not in that scary take-the-keys-for-the-love-of-god kind of way, but in that zip-downtown-to-the-grocery-store-for-eggs kind of way. I did not take the unannounced arrival of weaponry at my home as a sign she was mentally slipping.
I took it as a sign that the hardware store where she went to ship the package was incompetent, possibly criminally so. See, in small towns in Maine, there aren’t UPS stores, so sometimes small businesses like hardware stores offer UPS shipping to local customers. Usually, this works fine.
When I called the hardware store the next day, they were relieved to hear from me. They asked me, “do you have a UPS store down there?” Yes, down here in the largest city in New England, we do in fact have UPS stores. Hard to believe, isn’t it? They even have packing peanuts, but I didn’t tell them that. I told them I’d bring the gun to UPS the next day, and use their account number to send it on to the gun shop in Indiana where it was supposed to go in the first place.
Unfortunately for me, after lugging the three-foot plus long box on and off two different subway lines, the UPS store people were not helpful. They wouldn’t take the rifle off my hands. For my trouble, I was about to be late for work, and I still had the gun.
So I put the box under my arm, and hiked down the street to work. I put the package in the hallway and went into my boss’s office. “I’m really sorry,” I tell her, “I know it is inappropriate to bring a weapon to work, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
Good thing for me I had explained, the day before, about the mixed-up packages. (And that my boss can appreciate absurdity.) I waited for UPS to send a pick-up person. I wanted to get rid of the gun. I had no idea it would be so hard to get rid of a gun. I mean, I thought these things were supposed to be difficult to get your hands on in the first place. Who knew they could be sent over state lines and left in stairwells until you came home from work to check your mail?
I called the hardware store again, to check their progress in getting a pick-up person to my office. I find out that another, much more expensive gun has also “gone missing” in shipment from their store. I can only hope that an item that expensive (since “deadly” clearly wasn’t a consideration) was wrapped in plastic and cushioned with something more substantial than advertising for underwear and barbecue grills.
My guess? The other, much more expensive $18,000 weapon is lying under a pile of newspapers in a lobby somewhere, because somebody forgot to put a vacation delivery stoppage on their paper, and the hardware store slapped the wrong label on the box. Won’t they be surprised when they get home, and find a gun instead of those new cross-country skis.
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