Pam
When I first met Pam and her sister Lia through my friend Rob, I was in my late teens.  Rob is my oldest friend and his brilliance
is only exceeded by his eccentricity.  He had found a group called the Society for Creative Anachronisms, the SCA for short.  They are a group that re-enacts life in the dark ages in Europe, pretty much.  This of course was way cool for a geeky teenager like me.  Rob found costumes for me, the two girls, and himself, and organizes the four of us to go for the weekend.  It was fun, but I found that the people there, were so into it that many, did not seem to have the kind of joy of experience, of fun, that was needed to keep my interest.  I wanted to run around with swords and carouse, but there were rules about ‘knowing what you were doing’ before you were aloud to do anything cool.

Rob had brought a cross bow with him.  It was this mother big gnarly cross bow that his dad had built of wood and heavy spring steel, and it had very serious arrows with dangerous metal barbed tips.  We were at the archery range right away, shooting arrows until we were too tired to pull the bow back.  The girls were not interested in shooting the thing at all, being dumb girls.  (They are actually both brilliant,  literally geniuses, but in this case not being interested in something as mind bogglingly cool as a cross bow, especially without adult supervision, categorized them as dumb girls.  I should mention that these two girls were also beautiful.  So beautiful that I could barely talk when I was around them.  I still have this problem with them even now).

Finally Pam came wondering over to see what was so damn interesting about shooting the crossbow.  She walked up and asked if she could give it a try.  Rob and I smirked a private smirk to each other, a dumb girl trying to shoot a cool thing like a cross bow.  I have to say now that Rob and I had been firing this crossbow at a hay bale with a bull’s-eye target on it for quite some time (to the detriment of all living things in the general vicinity).  It had taken us a while to even begin to hit the hay bale.  We were competing hard to be the first to hit a bull’s-eye.  We of course didn't tell Pam that we only just started hitting the target lately.  We handed her the bow and Rob gives her the briefest of instructions on how to aim and shoot.  She put the bow to her shoulder and, apparently with out aiming, fires.  The arrow had a straight trajectory.  It shot the full distance we had been shooting and found its mark in the center of the red bull’s-eye.  It was a perfect shot.  We (Rob and I) were astonished, and tried valiantly to keep our jaws from hitting the ground.  After a brief pause, Pam handed the bow back to Rob and said "thanks, that doesn't seem so hard" and walked back (grinning I think) to the camp.

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