My dear old friend and confidant Mlle Jenny
purchased for me, a scrip to “Garden and Gun” magazine. I have to observe, it is finely done and beautiful to look at, and I am confident I will look forward to receiving it each month.
It shows every sign of being the kind of magazine that details what we northerners might think- accurately or inaccurately- as “old southern”. Big antebellum homes with kennels full of field trial champions. Shooting brakes and Kentucky colonels.
For the most part, I suppose, this is a fantasy- but it’s still an interesting one. And reading the magazine will be enjoyable in the way owning a lottery ticket is enjoyable- you can imagine what it would be like to sit in the shade of a huge porch and gaze out over giant lawns, planning lavish dinner parties and inviting friends over for a couple hundred rounds of clays, admiring the bespoke shotguns and smoking cigars after dinner over smooth local bourbons. Don’t think about it being a fantasy and it will be plenty enough to put a smile on your face as you drift off to sleep, lottery ticket under your pocketknife on the night stand.
“…you can imagine what it would be like to sit in the shade of a huge porch and gaze out over giant lawns, planning lavish dinner parties and inviting friends over for a couple hundred rounds of clays, admiring the bespoke shotguns and smoking cigars after dinner over smooth local bourbons.”
Throw in a brace of Bluetick and Black & Tan Coonhounds and you’ve got a typical weekend at the Hunt Club. Ain’t no fantasy in these parts.
I was perusing a copy of G&G this morning while enjoying my Morning Glory.
I can’t believe I never saw this magazine until I was in the waiting room at the retina doctor’s office.
Even with rapidly dilating eyes I was turning the page and “ooh, that’s cool.”
Letters to the editor concerned their trip to the Beretta factory. I was sold American.
It took every ounce of willpower not to steal that magazine.
I did run out and buy one and then got a subscription and one for Og too — I mean, the copy I got had a recipe for making your own Moon Pies. There ain’t nothing more Southern than that unless maybe you deep fried it after you made it.
Enjoy, Og. I’m certainly liking it. And remember “It only takes a dollar and a dream.”
Jenny
…and Roy Blount, Jr. essays. Don’t forget the Roy Blount, Jr. essays. Great cocktail articles (not just recipes)…hmmm, great road trip planning magazine.
Guy my dad knew via CBMC prayer breakfasts in Atlanta was a lawyer type. Had a condo for his pied-a-terre in the city during the week. We drove out to see his home in the country southeast of town; it was an honest-to-gawd antebellum plantation house, obviously a rarity in that neck of the woods thanks to Sherman, with outbuildings dedicated to his hobby of raising large wildfowl.
While I didn’t take the summertime caretaker gig, I did take away a new benchmark for la dolce vita.
Are you sure you don’t mean clip?
William Tecumseh Sherman, the original Urban Renewal guy. Atlanta routinely tears down most historic buildings to this day, I guess the thought is old don’t stay, history teaches that.