Helping my father move. Combing through the clutter of a lifetime. Yearbooks and musty Christmas cards and sentimental vases. Shoeboxes of receipts from 1986. A mashed clay figurine of my mom that I made when I was six. Trinkets from the days when I felt safe. We don’t know what to do with these things.

The house is almost empty. My father has a bag of guns. “You want them? Otherwise I’ll take ‘em to a pawn shop.” A green army duffle leans against the wall with a few shotguns and rifles poking out the top. My great great grandfather’s rifle. My grandfather’s shotgun. A pistol from World War II. They’re beautiful. I pick up a shotgun. Pump action. I know this because I go to the movies.

Handling a gun feels surprisingly natural. Powerful. Like suddenly I’m six again, playing cops and robbers and death is still an abstraction. I peer through the scope.

“What kind of gun is this?”
“A .22 — I grew up with that gun.”
“It feels like a toy.”

At night I often dream of guns. Vivid high pressure fever dreams. I have a recurring dream where I buy a shotgun at a swap meet and immediately lose it under the seat of a rental car. I’m frantically groping for it while attackers crash through the windshield. Sometimes I find the gun in time but the barrel is pointed the wrong way, Wile E. Coyote style. Or somebody else is pointing a gun at somebody I love. Think fast. And sometimes I dream of gigantic helicopters dropping boxes of guns into the most frightening parts of the world. Blades beat in the middle of the night and searchlights sweep across jungle and desert while thousands of people clamor for boxes of pistols. I probably saw this on TV.

Although they’re always in my dreams, I don’t know how I feel about guns. The argument that we’re safer if we’re armed makes no sense to me. But I remember one night when swerving high beams flashed in my rearview somewhere in the Sonoron desert. Somebody threw a bottle. I remember wishing I had a gun.

My father pulls out boxes of X-tra Range Shotgun Shells and Rim Fire Cartridges for the .22. “This ammo is probably still good,” he says. He tells me I don’t need a permit for rifles and antique pistols. Even if this is true, I don’t think driving through the Midtown Tunnel with a trunkful of old guns is a bright idea.

He tells me hunting stories and army stories. My great great grandfather feeding his family. My great grandfather’s stint as a night watchman. My grandfather returning from the war. “You can’t sell these,” I say. I dig the wood. I read the engravings and examine the bullets. I cock the hammers. “Rabbit ears,” my father says.

I tell him to keep them. Let’s put them in storage. We might need them someday.