A CAN OPENER

Dean Bakopoulos, author of “Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon,” recalling his Detroit prep school days in Mr. Bean’s Honors English Class:



When we finished reading “The Nick Adams Stories,” Mr. Bean gave us the task of finding the “perfect Hemingway sentence,” the one that summed up worldview of this writer that so many of us suddenly wanted to become. If we found it, we’d get an automatic A for the semester.

The next morning, our searches proved fruitless. We went around the room, making our best guesses, all of us wrong. Then Mr. Bean stood up in the center of his room and, in his booming voice, he turned to “Big Two-Hearted River” and read the perfect Hemingway sentence: “He liked to open cans.”

We were baffled. We groaned and complained and said that we’d been had. Seriously? That?

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So here’s Jimmy O, the one-eyed hunter, propped against a tree sound asleep. Like Roy Ferris before him, Jimmy O never wandered far from camp, whereas, those of us who pilfered cans of peaches, beef jerkey and toilet paper eagerly headed for the woods. We dressed in layers, and when nature came a calling, we begrudgingly propped our rifles against trees, peeled off enough clothing, and did our business.

I haven’t hunted in years, but if I decided to join my dad and brother, I’d be sure to pack my own can opener in my Pabst Blue Ribbon hunting box. With each ticking second ... minute ... hour spent in the woods, you never knew when that eight-point buck would come your way. We all wanted that one chance, that one shot, to be successful, to come back and retell our stories of how it all happened. Plus, it would be inexcusable to confiscate that designated can opener from hunting camp—that is, unless you dragged a trophy buck into the clearing.

My brother emailed the following picture below. Seems a buck is walking around with a tin bucket caught on his antlers.