By David Wilkinson
Sometimes being mistaken for someone else is a high compliment, especially when it puts you in some good company.
Some of my fondest memories are the times I went quail hunting with my dad and grandfather outside the small farming community of Buffalo, Okla., where my grandparents lived and my parents were raised. Grandpa was an avid hunter. Through the years he bagged deer, elk, quail, pheasants, wild turkeys, rabbits, squirrels and more. He told stories about hunting on horseback as a boy, shooting into thick coveys of quail in a day when the birds were abundant and when hunting was for putting food on the table rather than for sport.
Among my prized possessions is the Winchester 20-gauge pump shotgun Grandpa gave me (following the .22 rifle he proudly awarded me as an 11-year-old, to the dismay of my parents) and two silver dollars, dated 1886 and 1888, salvaged from coins that he would save up to pay for deer-hunting trips to Colorado. The Winchester lies propped in its case in a bedroom closet. It hasn’t been fired since the last time I went hunting with Grandpa as a college student. The silver dollars sit at the bottom of a safe-deposit box at the bank.
But the rich memories are accessible at a moment’s notice.
The white-ash gavel handcrafted from one of the author’s boyhood baseball bats by his Uncle Max.
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One of those memories is instantly called to the surface whenever I glance at a wooden gavel that rests atop one of the bookcases in my office. Beautifully handcrafted from white ash, it was one of five gavels, each fashioned from one of our childhood baseball bats and given last Christmas to my four siblings and me by our Uncle Max.
Which leads me to memories and mistaken identity.
I can picture Grandpa, Dad and me trudging across a fallow wheat field on a blustery winter morning during the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays, the frozen earth crunching beneath our hunting boots. My nose is red and runny, my fingers and toes numb, my eyes stinging, my mouth cottony, my shoulders aching from an hour-and-a-half of toting the shotgun, and the pouch at the back of my hunting vest that by now was supposed to be heavy with the weight of dinner fare instead limp and undisturbed. And I am immensely happy.
A few minutes later, Grandpa and his hunting dog, Skip, descend into the thick underbrush of a shallow, red-clay gully (what he called a “draw”). Grandpa always insists on doing the dirty work of flushing the birds while putting Dad and me in the best position to get off a good shot. Then Skip slows as he sniffs out the presence of birds that had been quietly scurrying ahead of him. Grandpa follows suit until dog, hunter and the unseen quail are all frozen in place, waiting for the moment of chaos when the sound of fluttering wings breaks the silence.
Sometimes, at those moments, Grandpa would signal with one hand and then say, just loud enough for me to hear, “OK, Max, be ready.”
On those occasions of mistaken identity, my heart would pump with pride as well as excitement. Grandpa was infinitely proud of his son. I often slept upstairs in “Max’s room” where I would read his old Zane Grey books and gaze at the framed picture of the handsome young man in an Air Force uniform. Uncle Max was immensely worthy of my admiration on his own merits, but I would have loved him just because Grandpa loved him.
The thought of correcting Grandpa whenever he would call me Max never entered my mind. I simply reveled in the moment of mistaken identity.
As Father’s Day approaches and memories are pulled out and dusted off from their storage places in my aging brain, I am grateful for treasured time spent with a loving father and grandfather (Grandpa was my maternal grandfather; my dad’s father died when I was less than a year old).
But my mind also turns to the future. Someday, if I should be blessed with a grandson, perhaps there will be an occasion when, completely unaware, I slip up and call him Micah. I can only hope that the love I have had for my son since the day I became a father for the first time would cause my grandson to experience a fraction of the pride of mistaken identity I felt decades earlier when Grandpa would sometimes call me Max.