“Oh, good,” I say. Now I start recognizing faces around me but can’t put any names to them. Relatives of my wife. Country faces. Some of whom have even fewer social skills than myself. I feel a strange empathy with these weathered northern men, with their huge knuckled hands and gentle ice-blue eyes. Even so, it makes it no easier to chat with them. There is a woman from New York who stands out from all the Midwesterners in her solid-black scary outfit with lace-up combat boots and shorn matching black hair. She has an anguished, perplexed look, as if she’s done way too much time in psychotherapy. She’s going on and on about how she got lost in her rental car trying to find her way out here from the Minneapolis– St. Paul airport. She seems to have a great appetite for engaging people in her smallest dilemmas and turning them into some huge dramatic deal.

Finally, I recognize a woman from Montana, a friend of my wife’s sister, who I’ve always found fairly easy to talk to, mainly because she’ll talk about anything that pops into her head, from Shakespeare to Christmas pudding. She finds everything “fascinating” and “wonderful.” I veer toward her, hoping I can engage her before someone else does, and, sure enough, in less than a minute she is asking me about guns—not my favorite subject, but it beats Bush-bashing or Tiger Woods–fawning, which seem to be the two main topics in the room. She is concerned about a recent string of assaults on single women in the area of St. Paul she’s just moved into and is wondering if maybe now is the time to consider carrying a side arm. I find it hard to believe that anyone could get assaulted in St. Paul, but what do I know? I never go into the cities. I try to discourage the woman from Montana from carrying a weapon at all, with the usual caution that it could be used against her. Instead, I recommend she pick up a .410 shotgun for household protection, just in case some idiot followed her home and busted down her door. “You can’t miss with a .410,” I tell her. “It’s light. It’s fast. And you can shoot from the hip.” She smiles. She likes the Western connotation. She asks me if I own one and I tell her yes, but it’s not for sale. She asks if she can see it so she at least knows what a .410 looks like. “Well, they’re all down in the basement in a big shipping crate,” I tell her. “I never unpacked them since we moved from Virginia.”

“Oh, so you mean we can’t see them, then?” she says, acting deeply disappointed. I’m surprised she could attach so much emotion to a .410 so quickly.