Fishing

FISHING TRIP

The fishing trip went as fishing trips usually do: up and out before anyone else was stirring, father and son together, quiet in their anticipation of the day to come. They headed out to the secret spot the father knew about, and set up their gear; nothing fancy, just some simple hooks to augment their natural ability to pluck sustenance out of the great Stream.

The father was ready first, and he tested the Stream with an outstretched limb. Cool today, running a bit slow, not much activity. He fixed his hooks, dipped several thick lines in, and settled back to wait. The son tried to imitate what he saw his father do, and ended up with several of his lines tangled together. He glanced quickly towards his father, but the father gave no indication that he’d seen this blunder. So the son shrank into himself, fixed his attention on the tangles, and after a bit of yanking and struggling, had them free. He expanded out again, and dropped his lines into the Stream, more carefully this time.

Nothing happened for ages, just the lazy drifting of their lines. Occasionally a whisper of a disturbance. And then, all of a sudden the son leapt up.

“I got one! I think I got one!”

And indeed, one of his lines was tauter than the others.

“Draw it in slowly,” his father counseled, “Imagine you’re inviting it to you, rather than yanking on it. And don’t let your other lines go!”

The boy pulled up the slack in his other lines, which had begun to drift down Stream, and focused on slowly inviting the taut line to retract. Closer and closer it came, wriggling, fighting. He could see the silvery shimmer at the end of his line. He drew it in. It resisted. He braced himself and pulled harder.

“Gently, gently,” said the father, standing at his son’s side, ready to help lift out the Catch. “Let it wear itself out. Then it will come more easily.”

The son let up the tension a bit, and felt the hook start to slip loose. He jerked reflexively, felt something rip, and then catch tighter, and all of the sudden the silvery, sparkling mass popped out of the Stream. His father grabbed the line and pulled in the Catch.

“Lessee, let me see!” chirped the son, excitedly. He peered at the Catch on the end of his line and then his whole body deflated to half its size. “Car Keys. It’s just a lousy, stinkin’, Car Keys!”

The father gently disengaged the Catch from the line, and tossed it down Stream.

“The day is early yet,” he said.

“I thought it was at least a Car. Maybe even a First Car!”

The father smiled indulgently.

“ No, son, a First Car would be much, much bigger. Depending on how old it was. If it was new, it might even pull harder than you and you’d have to disengage. You wouldn’t want to lose one of your lines, would you?”

The son mumbled that he guessed he wouldn’t.

“Okay. Now cast your lines again. Try that hollow over there. Maybe there’ll be a First Grade Teacher, or even a Colleague’s Name.”

The son perked up at the thought of getting a Name, and cast three of his lines into the hollow, letting the others trail in the main body of the Stream. He peered into the depths of the Stream, trying to will the Names to come to his hooks.

The father resumed his patient position, extending his long, cylindrical trunk and letting his lines drift wider and deeper. The next bite was his, and he reeled in a decent-sized 8th Anniversary. It was rich and juicy, as most Anniversaries were. That would be good eating. He soon added a Dentist Appointment and a handful of State Capitals. They were small, but quite tasty if well-seasoned. He caught a few rejects, including a What I Came In Here To Get, but then he reeled in his biggest Catch of the day, a Pain of Labor. It was pretty fresh, and therefore put up a struggle, but in the end it almost seemed to want to be caught.

Content with the size of his haul, the father looked over to see how his son was doing. He was pleased to see that his son had happened upon an old trick: dimming the purplish phosphorescence of his body and concentrating that glow in the tips of the lines streaming out from the top of his trunk, brightest at the ends, just above the hooks. The son was waving his lines slowly in the dark of the hollow, and had ended up mesmerizing himself, as well as any potential Catch. He was so still and focused that when the rosy glow drifted up to one of his hooks and started circling, he didn’t react in any outward way. If possible, he became stiller, except for a slight, ever-so-subtle swishing of the hook back and forth, back and forth. An impulse grew in him, and he began to subtly increase and decrease the glimmer at the end of his line, brighter and dimmer, in time to the swishing of the hook. The rosy glow in the Stream coalesced around his line-tip – and thus around the sharp hook – and pulsed in time with the purplish glimmer of the line.

The son waited. The father watched. And when the rosy glow had concentrated itself into a ovalish, semi-solid form around the hook, the son whipped his line out of the Stream and drew it into his trunk, quickly wrapping the rest of his lines around it. The Catch wriggled a few times, and then lay still.

“What did you get there?” the father asked.

The son unfolded his lines, peeling away one and then another, and finally there it was, in the middle of the impromptu net. It was very old, somewhat withered and faint, but with a concentrated, well-polished shine. Unmistakable. A First Kiss.

“Well done, my boy! That’s a beauty!” his father said.

Beaming with pride, the son brought his Catch to join his father’s, and they set off home to share the riches with the others.

On the quiet intersection of 7th Ave. and 12th St. an old woman shuffled down the sidewalk. She felt a muffled twinge of loss, and paused for a beat, staring into the distance, her hand raised involuntarily to her lips. Then she gave a small hmph, shrugged her shoulders, and entered the bakery. The man behind the counter gave her a warm smile; a smile his dentist should have been examining at that very moment. In the hospital across the street a new mother held her baby in her arms, the agony of the preceding 16 hours melting away. And deep below, in the building’s garage, a man patted his pockets and scratched his head, wondering just where the hell he’d left his car keys.

Andrea Blumberg