Sometime in the early Eighties, a year or two after I moved from Ljubljana back to Boston together with my first wife and our son, I somehow got an air pistol. I cannot imagine ever buying such a toy, though. Most likely someone we knew wanted to get rid of it. It must have been an unwelcome present from the very beginning. One way or another, I remember practicing with it together with my son in the basement of one of the houses where we were staying at the time. We both enjoyed it, but we quickly abandoned this pastime. The pistol remained with me, though. It was with my effects on my way from Boston to Reading, and I rediscovered it when I was moving from Reading to Motovun. The sturdy triangular box in which it was housed had fallen apart, and I discarded it before the move. But the pistol itself is in great shape. Made in Czechoslovakia, it has a fancy name that explains how it got to the States: Tex 086. All it needed was a little bit of WD 40, and it now looks like new. Two days ago I got the lead pellets for it, something one can actually find in the hunters’ store in Motovun, and I immediately returned to practising. After some twenty years of neglect, I was kind of rusty at first. My targets are gutters on a neighboring building. One is vertical and the other almost horizontal. I cannot hurt anyone by shooting at the wall, and the wall can take this kind of punishment. Best of all, my targets let me know when I hit them. Poink! Whatever I am doing around the house, every now and then I take the pistol from the kitchen counter, load it, step out on the terrace, and shoot. Poink! As soon as I hit one of the gutters, I put the gun back in its place. After only two days, I am getting pretty good at it. By the way, this is what I just did before returning to my desk. Poink! This time around, this was my first shot, too.