The Czech Pistol

Tucked away in an old box we were storing for a neighbor was a beautiful small semiautomatic pistol. I found it rummaging around in the basement and was stunned by the feel of it. Small and cool. Deadly. Except the slide had a deep dent that made it impossible to move. I fantasized that the dent was a bullet strike during a WWII firefight. Romantic but probably not right. More likely this was done to render the gun a souvenir and legal to own. No way of getting the slide to move. I tried. A lot.
Even though it didn't work like a gun, it looked and felt like a gun. I carried it in my bomber jacket pocket. Mr. Big Shot. Only my closest friends knew about it, and they all had a "go" at carrying it. It went to school, to games, to the movies and occasionally on forays that were on the outside of the law. We never considered the possibility that by simply having this deactivated weapon anything we did was automatically elevated to a felony. Period. No arguing. We never considered the possibility that any sane policeman (all we had then folks where we lived) seeing it in the hands of a nervous teenager would believe it was a real loaded weapon and shoot in self defense. Never crossed our minds.
It went with us on our signature caper, the one that got us caught, but through some miracle it got ditched before the arrest.
That caper and the anguish that followed changed our lives for ever. We were lucky we got caught when we did and lucky we didn't have the gun with us. The support from parents, school, the cops and others got us through and to a better place.
We all got on and stayed on the "straight and narrow" for the rest of our lives.
I have often said that I am the total product of my life experiences, and to change even one would change everything. I believe that to my core. I am not proud of those days of mayhem but they, in part, made me who I am.
What happened to the Czech pistol? It went back into the box and eventually back to it's rightful owner. If it could talk I wonder what other tales it would tell?

Photo source: www.freeexistence.org/images/guns/