Olden Days

Emily and I are talking about the past. We are sitting inside a cobblestone house built a century before the shopping mall across the way, decades before the invention of the automobile that brought us to the table where we are drinking my double-tall fat-free latte and her mocha frappaccino, years before my own grandmother was born. The house is still there because Starbucks saved it from the bulldozers clearing land on either side to make way for other shops.

We look at windows made of hand-blown glass, an original fireplace with bookcases on the side, wide moldings around the door, and we wonder about the lives that passed through what had been this front parlor before it held our table and chairs. Visitors must once have presented themselves at the front door, and tradesmen delivered goods to the back. What kind of outbuildings once stood nearby?

On what is now heavily traveled Route 96 between Victor and Pittsford, agriculture has given way to commerce, and unless the Starbucks sign above the portico turns heads, most passersby may not even notice this architectural jewel that has seen if not better days, certainly ones almost unimaginably different from our own.

The Gun

Dear You,

My father was dying, and he was giving things away. So he came out of his bedroom that afternoon with the medals he'd earned in World War II, and a little pistol. It was, he explained, the .25 caliber gun he had taken from a Nazi officer -- his "pocket pistol," to distinguish it from the larger revolver the man had on his belt. I took it home and found his note that the Nazi was General Wolff, and the newspaper clipping that was with the gun explained he was SS, second to Himmler.

I took the gun home, learned to disassemble and clean it, ensured the clip and chamber had no bullets, and put it in a drawer. Today it is in my luggage, because I'm taking it to Michigan to give to my youngest brother for his birthday.

Some gift, you will say. You may look at this gun, think of its first owner, and speculate about the destruction it probably caused in that terrible period, when General Wolff was responsible for shipping so many human beings to their deaths. Should not a device, like its owner, be consigned to the rubbish heap of history?

The gun lobby often says that "guns don't kill people; people kill people," and I have no doubt that my brother will use this pistol as he does his other guns -- for sport, for recreation, for the same kind of pleasure he and I will derive from the fireworks I bought while passing through Pennsylvania . . . also intended to celebrate his birthday.

And perhaps someday, that gun will be another way for people to preserve the memory of the terrible past . . . another way to help us prevent a future holocaust.