Take the Cannoli Read Free

Mountains. I was a little worried that the National Forest Service would object to us lobbing fiery balls of metal onto its property. Dad laughed, assuring me that “you cannot shoot fireworks, but this is considered a fire arm ”.
    It is a small cannon, about as long as a baseball bat and as wide as a coffee can. But it’s heavy—110 pounds. We park near the side of the hill. Dad takes his gunpowder and other tools out of this adorable wooden box on which he has stenciled “PAT G. VOWELL CANNON-WORKS.” Cannonworks: So that’s what NRA members call a metalstrewn garage.
    Dad plunges his homemade bullets into the barrel, points it at an embankment just to be safe, and lights the fuse. When the fuse is lit, it resembles a cartoon. So does the sound, which warrants Ben Day dot words along the lines of ker-pow! There’s so much Fourth of July smoke everywhere I feel compelled to sing the national anthem.
    I’ve given this a lot of thought—how to convey the giddiness I felt when the cannon shot off. But there isn’t a sophisticated way to say this. It’s just really, really cool. My dad thought so, too.
    Sometimes, I put together stories about the more eccentric corners of the American experience for public radio. So I happen to have my tape recorder with me, and I’ve never seen levels like these. Everytime the cannon goes off, the delicate needles which keep track of the sound quality lurch into the bad, red zone so fast and so hard I’m surprised they don’t break.
    The cannon was so loud and so painful, I had to touch my head to make sure my skull hadn’t cracked open. One thing that my dad and I share is that we’re both a little hard of hearing—me from Aerosmith, him from gunsmith.
    He lights the fuse again. The bullet knocks over the log he was aiming at. I instantly utter a sentence I never in my entire life thought I would say. I tell him, “Good shot, Dad.”
    Just as I’m wondering what’s coming over me, two hikers walk by. Apparently, they have never seen a man set off a homemade cannon in the middle of the wilderness while his daughter holds a foot-long microphone up into the air recording its terrorist boom. One hiker gives me a puzzled look and asks, “So you work for the radio and that’s your dad?”
    Dad shoots the cannon again so that they can see how it works. The other hiker says, “That’s quite the machine you got there.” But he isn’t talking about the cannon. He’s talking about my tape recorder and my microphone—which is called a shotgun mike. I stare back at him, then I look over at my father’s cannon, then down at my microphone, and I think, Oh. My. God. My dad and I are the same person. We’re both smart-alecky loners with goofy projects and weird equipment. And since this whole target practice outing was my idea, I was no longer his adversary. I was his accomplice. What’s worse, I was liking it.
    I haven’t changed my mind about guns. I can get behind the cannon because it is a completely ceremonial object. It’s unwieldy and impractical, just like everything else I care about. Try to rob a convenience store with this 110-pound Saturday night special, you’d still be dragging it in the door Sunday afternoon.
    I love noise. As a music fan, I’m always waiting for that moment in a song when something just flies out of it and explodes in the air. My dad is a one-man garage band, the kind of rock ’n’ roller who slaves away at his art for no reason other than to make his own sound. My dad is an artist—a pretty driven, idiosyncratic one, too. He’s got his last Gesamtkunstwerk all planned out. It’s a performance piece. We’re all in it—my mom, the loneliest twin in history, and me.
    When my father dies, take a wild guess what he wants done with his ashes. Here’s a hint: It requires a cannon.
    â€œYou guys are