Getting Ready To Fish

Children are one part of a complex operation, consisting, in part, of family, community, neighbors, schoolmates, etc., etc. Because this is true and because children generally accept whatever composes their universe, they tend not to question nor to take particular note of the general movement within their world.

 There’s a lot I didn’t know about Daddy. He just was. And that was fine with me.

Now, of course, there’s so much more that I wish I knew. Maybe that’s a part of being human. You think?

Our Daddy did not marry until he was 31 and much after I was grown I caught a glimpse or two of his prior life. These glimpses came mainly from a few photos showing him holding up a brace of geese or a string of very large fish. Where they were taken or when I never found out, for I didn’t ask and he didn’t offer. Daddy didn’t like to talk about his years before we came along, although once in a while we could get a little information out of him. But that is for another post.

He did bring along with him to Tennessee his love of fishing, and I can remember some of his fishing trips. He would get up VERY early and cook a HUGE breakfast for himself, including bacon, eggs, and fried potatoes, something the family did not ordinarily have. Mother was not part of this. (probably by mutual consent!)

Way back in the 1940’s there was no bait shop where a fisherman could buy bait, so he had to figure out how to get the bait to make his trip to the lake or the river work. Daddy would go seining for minnows in creeks somewhere over near the mountains —don’t ask me where; I was just excited to be allowed to go along. The creeks might have been somewhere around Clinch Mountain. That’s my best guess.

He took me along on many of these trips, and while he seined, I played in the creek looking for crawdads.

More than once Daddy’s glasses fell out of his shirt pocket and into the creek and he had to go home without them. And once my sandal slipped off my foot and raced away in the swift water. We never found it. I have no memory of what Mother’s reaction was when we came home and had to tell her!

I can still see the crawdads and almost feel the cold, cold water pushing across my feet.