You Can’t Go Home Again, But You Can Drive Through The Old Neighborhood.

Let’s go back 40 years to a magical time that I like to call “The Mid-80s.” The Kevin in that time really wasn’t amounting to much. He was working dead-end retail jobs and the only thing that mattered in his life was gaming two or three nights a week. I had no future, and I didn’t really care that I had no future, either.  I had my curiosity and my creativity, though, and at that point in my life, I channeled into role-playing games, doing research on all manner of arms and armaments for the characters in my games. In the course of that research, I took a shine to four guns: The Browning Hi-Power, the H&K MP5, the Witness Protection 870 shotgun and the H&K PSG-1. 

Actually, more than role-playing games, I think the first iteration of Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six” games were responsible for this particular obsession. I digress…

Mid-80s me could never even dream of owning any of those guns. The best I could do was go shooting with my friends and send rounds downrange through their guns. They worked in IT, and had money. I didn’t, and therefore didn’t. Still, though, it was nice to dream about such things, and then act out my fantasies in the games. Then one day, the 1979 Pinto I was driving died, and my Dad and I went car shopping. I waxed poetic about getting something nice, maybe a sports car or a convertible, but I knew such things were out of the price range for my family. 

The next day, my dad went with a friend to a local wholesale auction house, and what should appear in our driveway on his return was a 1977 Fiat 1600 Spyder convertible. Reliable? No. Sport and sexy? Oh heck yes. The arrival of this car happened just as I started working in a camera store, and I discovered how photography could nurture both the rational and creative sides of my brain. Now I had something I wanted to do, and something to be proud of. 

Flash-forward forty years, and the Fiat is long gone, probably rusting away in a junkyard somewhere. I’m no longer a photographer, but I take a lot of pictures and video for my job, a job that has allowed me to acquire a Mossberg replica of the Witness Protection shotgun, Military Armament’s large-format pistol clone of the MP5 and Girsan’s copy of the Hi-Power, albeit in compact size and with a rail and a dot. The PSG-1? Well, I’ve kinda cooled on that particular gun, but I am on the hunt for a good Designated Marksman RIfle. 

I’m in the final third of my life. The first third could have been better, the second third was a tad confusing and the resolution of the final third is up for grabs. But it’s nice to look at these three guns and tell myself, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”