I bought it when I was 13. I still have it. I clean it up every year.

Last Sunday, I took it for a walk.

I asked myself a question.

“Self,” I mused, “How many people have something that they got as a child and they still use it regularly today?”

Most geezers have only sentimental value items, e.g., photographs, hope chest baubles, perhaps a small item of furniture.

There are exceptions. Some people have lived entire lives in the same house. They keep many heirlooms..

The act of moving causes most of us to shed things.

My wife showed me her only remaining childhood possession, a gray half-circle of rock held in the palm of her hand: A geode, she said. She has always loved rocks and stones. Her heirloom is a crystal inside a cavity within the rock, probably quartz.

My younger daughter still has the toy gray stuffed cat that she clung to throughout her childhood.

of us take small items with us from cradle to grave. I recently lost the Zippo lighter that Dad had carried in World War II’s Pacific theater. I think a change of residence was the cause.

But I still have my walking companion from last Sunday.

It is a Winchester Model 94 lever action rifle, caliber .30-30. The leather sling that came with it did grow brittle and was replaced with a synthetic fabric sling.

But the rifle itself works just as it did back in 1956. At 50 yards, it shoots one inch high and three inches to the right, just fine for hunting deer, especially given my now diminished shooting skills.

The rifle had belonged to a man who had worked with Dad. He had used it for one season, then died. His widow wanted to be rid of the rifle, and I wanted to have it. We settled on $52.

Google tells me that $52 in 1950 is equivalent to $561.83 today, a growth in value of $509.83 over six decades.

Back in 1956, no teenager I knew had $52 in spare cash. So each Friday, after I had collected the money owed by my paper route customers, I went to the woman’s house a block away from ours, knocked on the door, and paid her $2.

I got dividends: Cookies! Yummy half-round sugar cookies with slurpy chonk’lit frosting, pungent anise cookies during the Christmas season.

That .30-30 took the place of the gun I had used during my first two seasons of hunting, a single-shot 16-gauge shotgun equipped with rifled slugs. That shotgun is now encased in our barn. I had read a horror story of a farmer being trapped by a hungry bear in his own barn. Chickens roost in our barn, so the shotgun is in a handy, albeit hard-to-spot, location for protection against roaming bruins and smaller varmints.

I had not gotten anything bigger than squirrels with that shotgun. I did not get my first deer until I was in college in the early ’60s. The .30-30 brought it down with one shot. I could hardly have missed. The doe was 10 feet away, stock still, staring at me through a sumac thicket.

It wasn’t until my firstborn son was ready to hunt that I got another rifle. A good friend, Pat Hartnett, was a superb rifle shot, as well as a fine all-around athlete. But Pat had a quirk. When he missed a deer, no matter how difficult the shot, he took a dislike to whatever rifle he had been using. I got a bargain price on a .308 lever-action Savage.

The .30-30 still went hunting, with one son, another son, a third son. A few grandchildren shot it, though none actually hunted with it.

Every year just before deer season, every firearm I own gets a thorough cleaning, mechanical check and attention paid to wood, leather and synthetic. So long after the hunters among my children had moved to their own places, I still hauled out and handled the .30-30. I removed some dust and relived some memories.

On occasion, I still chose it as my firearm. If the weather is lousy, driving rain or sticky or blowing snow and lots of wind, the .30-30 is my best brush gun for moseying through thickets. I don’t sit still for very long, so its light weight is appreciated as I move.

Last Sunday, just for old time’s sake, I sighted in on a clump of dirt about 30 yards away. I aligned the front sight bead within the rear sight’s “antlers.” Then, because there really was no need to shoot, I tipped the muzzle up to pull the gun away from my shoulder.

“Self,” I said, “you really ought to see… BLAM!” The clump of dirt jumped satisfactorily.

“Yep,” I told myself, “that’s just about how I remember it shooting.” The kick is lighter than my .308 or my .30-06, and much more bearable than the punch from my 12-gauge shotguns.

If I am here next year, it will be here as well. The value of six decades of memories cannot be counted in dollars.

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.