Bill, you have such a way with words that I just have to keep in mind what my mother said.
I am very grateful to those Parker collectors over the years who have helped me along and mentored me to find and acquire a handful of nice guns. I'm also grateful for military retirement pay and an opportunity to serve and achieve a modest amount of financial security through long and hard work, and well, a fair amount of luck. My military instructors always said they could teach a monkey to fly and I didn't prove them wrong. I never dreamed that military retirement pensions would be cause for resentment by those who chose different paths. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been able to spend reasonable amounts of discretionary income and savings to buy a few nice Parkers. I am so pleased for friends and acquaintances when they have means to acquire what they want and I find that I now get as much pleasure from helping friends find the right Parker as I did when I was acquiring guns. And I am grateful for the wonderful people that I have met through this collecting hobby, so much so that it is easy to overlook the few mugwumps and curmudgeons that we are saddled with.
|