ML: Thank you for doing this interview.
Sawed-off Sportsman: No problem. I did this once before and it worked out pretty
well.
ML: You mean interview yourself?
SS: Yes.
ML: When was that?
SS: I don’t have to answer that question.
ML: Then why did you ask it?
SS: Got to use a line out of a movie.
ML: Which movie? No wait, I know, you don’t have to answer that either, right?
SS: Correct-a-mundo.
ML: How long have you been ‘sawed-off’?
SS: I once heard someone say that people don’t change, they just become more and more like themselves. That’s been my aspiration.
ML: Earliest ‘sawed-offness’?
SS: Well I remember the garter snakes clearly from about 4 years old at my grandfather’s place. My mother said that when I was little she harnessed me to the close line in the backyard, you know so I could move around, and I took an unusual interest in worms.
ML: Were your parents ‘sawed-off’. I mean is this…..approach, genetic?
SS: My mother had her own shotgun and always accused my father of knocking the biggest pike off her line on their honeymoon. My father was experimental sawed-off. Two adventures of his ‘yut’ come to mind. Once he wondered if a deer could be killed with a .22 – he reported “no problem”. Another time he was experimenting with black powder and a rabbit ear shotgun that likely took cartridges. As he later said, the only mistakes he didn’t make involved tying the gun to a tree and pulling the trigger with a string. Had he not, neither one of us would have lived.
ML: And your children?
SS: Ah yes, the shavings; they vary. Shaving 1 doesn’t come across as sawed-off – she makes you take your shoes off before coming into her townhouse – but then there’s the 20 year old turtle and 600 guppies in the plastic garden pond in her dining room. Shaving 2 is not naturally sawed-off but she knows what she’s doing because I taught her some stuff before she knew what I was doing. Shaving 3 likes to get sawed-off if he can bring along a bunch of his friends. Shaving 4 is an extremely serious menace to both salt and fresh water teleosts; comes back from 8 hours on the high seas and goes down to the pier to relax by catching pinfish.
ML: And Mrs. Sawed-off?
SS: She wants me to abandon my aspiration and stop teaching the children stuff. I tell her “Honey, I gotta be me” and she says “Please stop.”
ML: So how many episodes of “Adventures of aSS” can we look for?
SS: I saw that.
ML: I meant to be amusing, have I failed?
SS: Nice shot.
ML: And the answer to the question?
SS: I don’t know how long we have. Who does?
ML
2/9/07
