Quaker House: Still The Best Quaker Job There Is As Quaker House of Fayetteville NC begins the search for a new Director (or Co-Directors), the situation there is in many ways different from my time as Director, from 2001 to 2012: then we faced a couple of big wars. Today’s many small wars are almost entirely invisible to the U. … Continue reading Quaker House: Still The Best Quaker Job There Is
It was on one of these trips, in one of those big new stores, on a warm spring day in 1954, that I found the most exciting toy gun in the world.
I had lots of toy guns, usually squirt guns or cap pistols. The cap pistols were almost all long-barreled six shooters, like the ones Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger used in the movies or one TV. The caps for them came in little thin rolls of reddish papers, with a row of dark bumps down the middle. The bumps were the gunpowder, or whatever it was that went BANG when I put them in a cap gun and pulled the trigger.
Caps were always fun, even if my favorite toy gun was broken. I could unroll them on the ground, and take a rock and pound on the dark gunpowder bumps with it. If we hit them just right they’d go POW and make a flash and a little puff of smoke. Sometimes we would find a big rock and smash a whole rolled up roll with it, to see if all the caps would explode at once; but usually they didn’t.
The only trouble with caps was that they got used up fast and didn’t last long. So whenever I found myself in the toy department of a store with a little money, which wasn’t often, I would buy some.
I didn’t have any money at all the day I saw that new gun, and there was only sixty-five cents in my piggybank at home, so I could only look at it longingly.
This was not some glossy cowboy weapon, made to look like it was invented a hundred years ago. No, this was a submachine gun, a weapon of modern warfare, a soldier’s gun. It had a dark blue metal barrel and a wooden stock and a key on one side which I could wind up so when I pulled the trigger it would go rat-tat-tat-tat and shoot a few dozen times like a real machine gun. And I could put caps in it too, so the noise would be really loud.
I caught up with the Dixie Chicks in Raleigh, and couldn’t get enough. But that was not all: there were two special, non-musical bonuses in their Tarheel gig:
One was a give-back. Since this is the summer of the notorious HB2, the Chicks had to think about whether to cancel the show, as Springsteen, Itzhak Perlman and so many other top-flight artists have.
They didn’t cancel, but took time to make plain where their sympathies lay: they passed out thousands of free hats with a special label, and mocked the absurdity of the bathroom law between songs.
Two big benefits of this decision were immediately evident, at least to this writer: for the liberals, it seemed to definitively squash the purge effort. Stuck a fork in it. They can now stop wasting their time wondering if they’ll be kicked out of NCYM in a month or two.
For the uneasy evangelicals, they finally got some space, some daylight, between them and the liberals: they won’t have their own YM, but they will have their own brand. Now when questions come up about such strange liberal notions as, say, being friendly to LGBTs, or against the newest wars, they can simply jerk a thumb leftward and say, “That’s not us, it’s those Prius Friends. We’re with the Pickup Quakes.” (Or would it be the NPR Quakes and the Fox fans? UNC or Duke? Kale or collards? Ketchup or vinegar? Texas Pete or Sriracha? I must be hungry. Send us your suggestions!)
Coffeehouse” is an annual Saturday Night tradition at Baltimore Yearly Meeting, where I’m still a member. It features silly skits and other such let-down-thy-hair amateur amusements.
This year I joined in one dreamed up by my co-star & co-conspirator Michael Newheart.
To get a sense of our public foolishness, check out this 9-minute video, and twist again like we did last summer (or maybe 50 summers ago)!