Concentration
By Hap Rocketto
Concentration is a critical skill in shooting. One must be able to shut out a variety of outside distractions while still maintaining an acute situational awareness of things going on about you. We even use earplugs and special hats to help block out the unnecessary. Never was my ability to concentrate tested more than during the last match of a recent indoor season.
My brother Steve was recovering from back surgery and I had been spending a lot of time tending to his needs during the month or so he was bedridden. I fed him, changed his linens, brought in his mail, and did all sorts of odd jobs. These included the occasional bath and, believe me, greater love hath no brother.
Remember those Saturday mornings of your youth when, with a few silver coins jingling in your pocket, you trekked off to the movies? After getting your ticket, a bag of popcorn and a box of Jujubes-those tiny fossilized sort of gumdrops, you hunkered down in your seat for a half dozen cartoons, the newsreel, and an episode of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, or The Adventures of Smilin’ Jack. Just before the two B grade action movie features began there would be a travelogue. Sooner or later the grainy black and white footage and rich voice of the likes of Lowell Thomas, Harry Von Zell, or Ed Herlihy would have you in Africa, or India, and the inevitable scene of elephants lying awash in a turgid river. Astride these gray behemoths were perched little native boys scrubbing them down with brushes as the pachyderms playfully squirted trunks full of water into the air like fireboats welcoming an ocean liner into port after a record breaking transatlantic run won the coveted “Blue Ribband”. Such was my lot during the period of his infirmity.
He was now well enough to travel and wanted to go to a match to catch up with everyone. I arrived to pick him up just as he was preparing a quick bachelor dinner. Ripping off a sheet of paper towel for a plate he laid out two slices of bread upon which he slathered a healthy dollop of his favorite spicy brown mustard, he next laid down a cartwheel sized round of liverwurst which he topped with a manhole cover sized slice of thickly cut white onion, the second slice of bread was then smooshed down on top to complete this gastronomical delight. He generously offered me one, but I declined.
Knowing that he was concerned about his cholesterol I mentioned liverwurst, a sausage made of liver, pork, fat, and other organ meats, was not he best of the wurst he might eat in his condition. He explained that his research had shown that eating raw onion increased his levels of high density lipoproteins there by negating any cholesterol found in the liverwurst. Who was I to argue? He is, after all, a trained logician. He rounded out the meal with a big glass of water-had to save calories somewhere, a chunk of sharp cheese and an apple.
It was a cold night so I went out to the car to warm it up and waited until he hobbled out. Fearing that he might breathe on me after his pungent dinner I was relieved to note that he was munching on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich he had slapped together to both freshen his breath and sustain him during his long frigid march from the front door of his house to the front seat of my car.
Arriving a Shawn Carpenter’s, just 15 minutes later, he mentioned that he was thirsty and gratefully accepted, from our host, a tall diet soda-had to save calories somewhere, a cylinder of string cheese the size of a short scope rod extension and another apple.
Soon after leaving Shawn’s we stopped for gas. While I was pumping the fuel Steve stumped off through the dark to the mini-mart. He soon returned with a cup of coffee with cream and artificial sweetener, had to save calories somewhere, in one hand and his other hand wrapped around a doughnut.
During the match Steve was at a table in the back of the range scoring targets while I was shooting. I had gotten onto standing when a commotion behind me cut into my concentration. Steve was complaining of chest pains! Charlie Adams, who had a heart attack a few years ago, checked to see if he was sweating and asked him if there was any numbness in his left arm. Those symptoms were absent. There was just a searing pain from his backbone to his breastbone in the area of his diaphragm. Rich DeBernardo, the EMT on our team, started to check him out, adding further distraction to my shooting.
It was quickly apparent that he was not suffering a coronary event but rather the negative effects of his night long, intense and haphazard grazing. Meanwhile his plight had gotten inside of my head. I was doing some rapid mental calculations concerning stomach acid. Face it, thirty years of teaching high school science dies hard. Gastric acid has a pH of 2 to 3, which means that it is at a concentration of about 0.2 moles per liter. I was curious about what molarity would cause my brother such distress and thought that a pH of 0.5, about where hydrochloric acid is, just might do it. Instead of concentrating on my shooting my mind was toying with the Brønsted-Lowry theory trying to calculate the molecular concentration of Steve’s stomach acid.
In the end it was concentration that got to us both. His gluttony caused his stomach acid concentration to rise so high that it scared the bejeebers out him causing my shooting concentration to drop so low point that I shot an eight standing, which scared the bejeebers out of me.
