Men should not be left alone without their wives. Grave errors result. This great truth now has hit home in ways I did not anticipate. Yes I fell into temptation. It started innocently enough. I should not have been hanging out in certain districts like that. Worse yet I should not have started looking into windows and imagining, "What would that be like?" At first I resisted. But more and more often I found myself taking certain ways home, while on the face of it seemed innocent enough. I mean, I could walk home that way. Couldn’t I? Certainly, it was a little longer, but not that much longer. But I found myself drawn to those windows again and again. 
In the end I was finding any excuse to walk by them. In my loneliness, I found that I would justify it by one excuse or another, thinking it doesn’t hurt anything just to look. But then it became an obsession. More and more I was drawn to that window, until I found myself one day actually going into the store. It was warm inside and filled with wondrous curiosities the likes of which I had never seen before. I mean I am just a guy from Moab basically, what did I know of the ways of the world, or with what power those kinds of things could draw me? The fall came swiftly. My rational self broke down. It was if I was possessed by my ape nature and I could not resist the temptation placed before me. If only Lori had been there to stop me. If only my parents training could have somehow bubbled up through the terrible lust that consumed me. But I gave in. I couldn’t seem to help myself; it was like watching myself in a movie all the while screaming at the actor as I watched him self-destruct on the screen, “Stop. Don’t do this!” but there was no stopping it. The train had lost its breaks; the boat its rudder. Pick your metaphor as long as it conveys unstoppable forward motion towards annihilation, it will describe what happened. On the day it happened I had a feeling I should not walk past the window.
I felt warned away as if somehow I knew the temptation was growing too much to handle. But there I was looking in the window again. It was like a work of art sitting there in the window. No, not like a work of art, it was a work of art. So I went in. The person at the desk must have sensed how nervous I was as I picked out the object of my lust. “A fine one indeed,” he said with a smile. “Very rare and precious.” It was too much. I caved in like a mine that’s support timbers have rotted to wormwood. So here it is:
I now own a Hagenauer. An art deco bronze from the famed Hagenauer brass works that closed 30 years ago. I know I shouldn’t have. But I couldn’t help myself. It was too perfect—me an evolutionary biologist and here an ape poised in the moment between four-legs and two, holding a rudimentary tool as it climbs into the future. Please. Don’t tell Lori what I’ve done. Is she finds out she will take an ax to me like her great-great-grandmother did to three husbands—everyone of them killed because they bought inappropriate brass works. But what’s this! I’m happy I did it! Happy I tell you. I won’t go back to my previous brass-less existence. I own a Hagenauer and take full responsibility for that means. And no I won’t be repenting.
Steve, don't worry. The rifles are fine and there is no damage to any of them. They justs had tons of fun posing with them. Timothy and Nathan did finally get the mattress upstairs and in the car.
.JPG)
