SPAM Hunting

I grew up in North Carolina, but for the most part I was a city boy.  I never farmed tobacco or cotton, never raised chickens and almost never went hunting.  For a few Thanksgiving mornings my Dad and I would go squirrel hunting in the woods down around Coleridge in rural Randolph County- with a bow and arrow.  Since neither of us were very accomplished bowmen, those squirrels were the safest animals in the woods.  Neither of us never owned a gun in our lives, so that was the only hunting we ever did. Until...

Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s a group of my friends discovered SPAM hunting.  This was before junk email became spam, back when SPAM was SPAM-  processed meat in a can that could be fried, covered in barbecue sauce or eaten straight from the can.  We always wondered where you mild find the wild SPAM animals that made up this glorious food, so one weekend we decided to go SPAM hunting. Alan (The Flash) Brown had access to a large wooded area (again in Randolph County) and some guns, and a group of us decided to try our hand at hunting the wild beasts.  Seeing (of course) as there is no such thing as a SPAM animal, we decided to create our own.  We hung targets from trees and placed them in bushes.  But these were no ordinary targets. We used old 8-track tapes and albums that we truly hated, as well as old ceramics from our days at Quaker Lake Camp.  I specifically remember a LaBelle album and a Roberta Flack 8-track that were blown to pieces.  At one point we also hunted leftover Halloween jack-o-lanterns.  Whatever we shot at, when we managed to hit them with Alan's 22 rifle or his shotguns, we blew the things to bits.  SPAM was flying everywhere, and we loved it!  We did this on several occasions over the years, and never once was an actual SPAM (or anything else!) harmed as we hunted together.  Those were some great times.

Over the years SPAM continued to play an important role in my life.  One of the youth ministries I served had a food drive for the homeless in which we collected around 700 cans of SPAM to distribute.  I gave away SPAM as a door prize on occasion at youth group.  And in 2002 a mission team from our ministry at Wesley Memorial UMC worked in Washington, DC, as part of the Center for Student Missions. One of the summer inters that year was a young man named Justin Hormel. That's right- Hormel.  His forefathers were the inventors of SPAM. He even had a SPAM t-shirt.  Life has a way of coming full circle, huh?

So why am I sharing all of this today?  Am I the new spokesperson for SPAM, or am I just completely out of things to write about?  Or maybe it is just that guns have been on my mind lately, and I am putting off writing the serious post that needs to be written.  Whatever the case, I encourage you to pick up some SPAM.  Fry it up and slap it on a sandwich.  Only then can you you really appreciate why we wanted to shoot the little critters. And never another living thing...

Because of Jesus,