Let's talk about the gun

The other day I posted the above photo and got several inquiries about what looks like a gun pointed directly at the fireplace.

So, that's not a gun. It's a brass telescope, readers. Yes, we lived in what was known as the boonies of Atlanta, Georgia in the mid-1970s. Perhaps there were others in that part of Georgia who would proudly display a gun in their family room, but those people weren't us. We'd moved to what was then the hinterlands of the city proper and lived in a large subdivision whose borders were still being drawn even as I sat there at our faux aged fireplace, dark paneling around me, enveloped by the lustrous sateen browns and rusts of the decade. Just behind me were two sliding glass doors that led to a deck that overlooked a small backyard and the deep, dark woods. The Toll's lived on one side of us in a dark, gloomy Tudor, and the Deal's lived on the other side in a colonial. Why a brass telescope was set up and what, exactly, there was to peer at, is beyond me, but perhaps it just looked good, in the same vein as that fabric on the couch, my red and white checked jumper with the white turtleneck and my curling-ironed hair.

Anywho.