Thread from the dead! I love it!
My first experience with Emersons began loooong ago...
When I was very young, I was a student of the late
Edgar Sulite and was trained in Lameco Escrima. In addition to "doble baston", Guro Sulite trained me in "daga", "daga y baston", and "espada y daga". Though I was his student for less than a year before his stroke forced him to stop training, he was like a father to me. Having grown up without a father, he had an enormous impact on my life, and I will never forget his kindness or his steely discipline. His greatest lesson to me was that my happiness was my own responsibility, and that I should never give up my pursuit of it.
From my training, I had become accustomed to the curved daggers of the Filipino martial arts. Also, my grandfather had given me a pocket knife with a strongly curved edge. It was a friction folder he had bought when he was young from a Jewish open air market close to where he lived back in Izmir, Turkey - one which, to my unending dismay, I had lost during a move.
When I got older, I began by visiting local knife stores and looking for just such a strongly curved knife, one which could serve as both a keepsake for my grandfather, and a self-defence knife suited for Lameco Escrima. I absorbed the opinions of people who had been knife nuts for much longer than I. They mostly shot off the same names: Spyderco, Benchmade, and Emerson. I decided to start with these companies.
I proceeded to look at the websites and catalogues for each of these major manufacturers. The knives were all solid looking, but none of them really matched the curves or lines I had become accustomed to. But it was on one particular day, in a small dusty old hunting equipment store in San Bernardino California, that I was absolutely dumbstruck when I laid eyes upon the Emerson Persian Tactical in a knife catalogue. It looked almost exactly like the knife my grandfather had given to me, and it had many of the same properties of the knives I had used when training under Edgar Sulite, Steve Grody, and others. I had to have it.
If you've been in the Emerson forums recently, you should be with the story which follows. I searched for an Emerson Persian for five years. I traveled to every knife store in the greater Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Ventura county area looking for a Persian, but everywhere I went it was on back order, or a new shipment was "due in soon". No one seemed to have it. I called Emerson Knives. They were very courteous, and told me that they would give me a call when a new production line was in the works. The call never came. I never went with another Emerson knife, so set was I on getting a Persian.
I was drawn by the attractive lines of the Cold Steel
Scimitar, and later the
Talwar. Both had the curves and profile that I wanted, but I carried them regretfully with a sharp longing pain for the Persian that never was. But I never gave up looking.
Eventually, I went back to Emerson and picked up a Super CQC-8,which I purchased because it had many of the qualities of the Persian. I loved it when it arrived and I EDCed it.
Fast forward to 2010. I'm 26 years old. I join up with this website called BladeForums at the suggestion of a friend. I hang around, posting and sharing my enthusiasm with other knife lovers. Then comes my fated post about my search for a Persian. I get an email directing me to a user on another forum who has one for sale - he says it has been locked up in his safe for five years, unused, waiting for me. The seller and I become fast friends, and after a few agonizing days of anticipation, the knife arrives. It is waiting for me on my computer desk when I came home from a long day at work.
I'll never forget the beat-to-shit Emerson box it came in, which I still have. Or the factory smell of the liners and G-10 as I pulled it out and flicked open the blade. Five years of searching, and a legacy of eight years prior to that, manifest as a wicked black blade clenched tightly in my fist. It is my grail knife, and I wouldn't trade it for anything else.
My grandfather and Guro Sulite told me never to give up looking for happiness. I've no doubt that they would be proud of me. Not just for the knife, but for everything I've accomplished since then.
Maraming salamat po (thank you) friends of BladeForums.
:thumbup:
:thumbup: