RM Vivas
US Veteran
I have a second wife.
Not as in I have two wives; rather I had one wife, got divorced and now have a second wife. A subtle but important (and expensive) clarification!
Since a person, outside certain religious conventions, is supposed to have only one wife (at a time), for my purposes here when I say “my wife” I am referring to my second wife.
My wife has been and continues to be remarkably tolerant and, most importantly, supportive of my interest in firearms. An excellent illustration of this is how last year she insisted I go to the S&W symposium even though that would mean leaving her home alone with our two older children (10 & 13) as well as a 6-week old baby! That’s support!
This is not to say that we don’t have occasional minor issues because of my scholastic and historical interests.
There are many times when she will call me to come out of my office for dinner or something similar and I say ‘Just a minute, I’m working on something” and I don’t emerge until four hours later. She can attest that I will think nothing of sitting down at my computer for a quick check of emails and eight hours later I’m still there, neck deep in NYPD or S&W archives furiously tracing the path of a gun through history.
When I finally do come up for air, she will observe that, like Alice in Wonderland, I must have fallen down the ‘rabbit hole’ of archival research. She’d be right. Our running joke is that we eventually move into our new home, I will construct a small building near the house that will be my office/library/archive/armory/redoubt and the sign over the door will read “The Rabbit Hole” accompanied by a heavily armed bespectacled rabbit in tweed coat with elbow patches and a pipe holding a revolver in one hand and a book in the other.
I mention this because, for upcoming Fathers Day, she has gotten me a most marvelous gift. She knows that I spend my time working on NYPD and S&W records and that my most intense periods are when I am doing a “Deep Dive” into either database; at those times, I am laser focused on researching that particular gun to the exclusion of almost anything else.
One other odd point; her name for me is usually Honey Bear. It’s a stupid long story about how that came about but that what she calls me and as a result anything involving a picture or drawing of a bear engaging in activities I partake in somehow winds up getting text messaged to me. In Bambi-world (I call my wife Bambi), I’m a bear.
I bring this all up as an explanation for the marvelous gift she got me:
A nice hooded sweatshirt. On the left chest, an ersatz Model 10 with my name on the barrel!
The best part? The illustration on the back:
Is that cool or what?
A bear (me!), heavily armed, with a fistful of NYPD documents approaching the rabbit hole where I execute all my Deep Dives.
I mean, I always said she puts up with a lot being married to me, but she really puts thought into these things!!
Best,
RM Vivas
Not as in I have two wives; rather I had one wife, got divorced and now have a second wife. A subtle but important (and expensive) clarification!
Since a person, outside certain religious conventions, is supposed to have only one wife (at a time), for my purposes here when I say “my wife” I am referring to my second wife.
My wife has been and continues to be remarkably tolerant and, most importantly, supportive of my interest in firearms. An excellent illustration of this is how last year she insisted I go to the S&W symposium even though that would mean leaving her home alone with our two older children (10 & 13) as well as a 6-week old baby! That’s support!
This is not to say that we don’t have occasional minor issues because of my scholastic and historical interests.
There are many times when she will call me to come out of my office for dinner or something similar and I say ‘Just a minute, I’m working on something” and I don’t emerge until four hours later. She can attest that I will think nothing of sitting down at my computer for a quick check of emails and eight hours later I’m still there, neck deep in NYPD or S&W archives furiously tracing the path of a gun through history.
When I finally do come up for air, she will observe that, like Alice in Wonderland, I must have fallen down the ‘rabbit hole’ of archival research. She’d be right. Our running joke is that we eventually move into our new home, I will construct a small building near the house that will be my office/library/archive/armory/redoubt and the sign over the door will read “The Rabbit Hole” accompanied by a heavily armed bespectacled rabbit in tweed coat with elbow patches and a pipe holding a revolver in one hand and a book in the other.
I mention this because, for upcoming Fathers Day, she has gotten me a most marvelous gift. She knows that I spend my time working on NYPD and S&W records and that my most intense periods are when I am doing a “Deep Dive” into either database; at those times, I am laser focused on researching that particular gun to the exclusion of almost anything else.
One other odd point; her name for me is usually Honey Bear. It’s a stupid long story about how that came about but that what she calls me and as a result anything involving a picture or drawing of a bear engaging in activities I partake in somehow winds up getting text messaged to me. In Bambi-world (I call my wife Bambi), I’m a bear.
I bring this all up as an explanation for the marvelous gift she got me:
A nice hooded sweatshirt. On the left chest, an ersatz Model 10 with my name on the barrel!
The best part? The illustration on the back:
Is that cool or what?
A bear (me!), heavily armed, with a fistful of NYPD documents approaching the rabbit hole where I execute all my Deep Dives.
I mean, I always said she puts up with a lot being married to me, but she really puts thought into these things!!
Best,
RM Vivas
