How to Raise a Boy
I’m not sure what to think about what my dad tried to teach me. So what should I teach my sons?
Sometime around 1987, my father tried to teach me how to shoot a gun. It was a Winchester Model 37, 20-Gauge shotgun that had been in the family for years but had been encouraged to be unpacked from mothballs by a fellow electrician who had a son about to enter high school like me, and it was agreed upon by all that Bryan’s bookish son needed to learn to hunt.
I’d never seen my father hunt, he’d never talked about hunting, and I’d never seen a gun in the house before. But one day I came home from school, and Dad was home early, waiting for me with that gun. “Time for you to learn this,” he’d said.
We were both shivering; it was freezing in rural Mattoon, my tiny hometown in southern Illinois, closer to Kentucky than Chicago, but it wasn’t just that. Unsteady and unsure of himself, he loaded a bullet into the chamber and told me to aim somewhere deep into one of the endless cornfields that make up whole swathes of this country still, the sort of vast expanse that you can fire a rifle blindly into and not worry about hitting anything anyone would ever notice. I told him I did not want to. He nodded gently and said he knew that but I had to fire anyway. I wanted to make him happy, or least not make him…
