Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Fishing


Last night I took my game character fishing. Some of the game characters have phenomenal success and catch quantities of fish in a short period of time, but my character doesn’t. She always has high hopes though and continues to take the long walk to the lakes in good spirits on the chance that fishing will be better than the last time.

It has been many years since I went fishing, but like my game character, my fishing experiences ended with mixed results. One of my earliest memories of fishing was when I was about 4 years old. My sister and I played in the shallow water at the edge of the lake while Mom and Dad stood in the water fishing a little further from shore. There were large boulders in the water that my sister and I could climb on as we splashed and waded.

When we left the water to sit on the boulders, leeches would be attached to our legs. I was too squeamish to pull them off and whined for Mom or Dad to stop fishing and remove them for me. My sister wasn’t at all perturbed about the leeches and pulled them off her legs without qualms. As I whined and cried, my sister would climb on the rock where I sat and remove the leeches from my legs. I would squeal and scream each time one was stretched into a long, slimy mass before it popped loose. Of course I got back into the water to play again, and each time my sister would remove the leeches.

Vern, one of my brother-in-laws, was an expert at catching big mouth bass. I once had the privilege of fishing in the private lake his family owned in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Many years ago, daughter and several of her cousins piled into my van and we drove across the pastures to the lake for a picnic and an afternoon of fishing. As the afternoon wore on, the children deserted me one by one and hiked back to the house but I continued baiting the hook and tossing the line into the water as far as I could.

With light fading and dusk edging into night, I hadn’t a nibble for my efforts. I had decided to quit when Vern came to see how I was doing. With nary a fish to show, I handed him the pole so he could try his luck while I put the picnic things in the van. On his first cast, he caught what turned out to be the biggest fish I had ever seen! It was a big mouth bass. I had never seen one and was astonished at the size. We ate it for supper that night and had great fun laughing at my fishing failure and Vern’s instant fishing success!


Iziz with fishIziz with Big Fish

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