My apologies to the dentist.

My apologies to the dentist, or rather to my teeth…I am not flossing tonight.  It is just too abrupt of a transition from the last thing I was doing, which was gutting fish, which was preceded by washing chicken eggs, which was preceded by carrying a stringer full of bluegills home from Hensley’s Pond, which was preceded by applying worms and grubs and soldier fly larvae and grasshoppers to hooks and taking fish off of them, which was preceded by grubbing about barehanded in the compost (after worms and soldier fly larvae), which was preceded by rummaging around in my grubby old tackle box, which was preceded by sowing fall spinach and beets, which was preceded by digging the last of the potatoes… we can argue about definitions of health and hygiene another day but there is little that could classically be understood as “hygienic” about my day.  These hands are staying out of my mouth tonight.

But truth be told it’s a warm feeling.  I never feel more like a dad than when my hands smell like fish poop and are covered with dried-on scales.  My thanks to Janelle’s dad who went ahead with Kali to Hensley’s Pond and then helped her (and Alida when she and I arrived) considerably as she tried her hand at angling.  This allowed me to do a little less dad duty and to do more fishing myself than I would have otherwise; tomorrow’s lunch is somewhat the richer for it.  My thanks also to Janelle and her mom, who brought with them a lovely picnic supper when they hiked up a few hours later.  It could hardly have been more idyllic:  us munching the probable last summery picnic food of the season while cool September breezes across the water got us reaching for long sleeves, and then an eleven-year-old, all elbows and knees and a smile visible from the opposite side of the lake running around to us with a bluegill dangling from her line that she had caught with absolutely no help from any adult (except spearing the grasshopper).  She is a very high-quality kid, I must say.  At one point before the women arrived, I spied her fishing in her favorite spot, sitting on the shore, cross-legged, watching her bobber (which she kept wanting to call a “bobbin”), doing nothing else at all, and I thought, She’s getting it.  Patience, simplicity, delayed gratification, the usefulness of imagination (you can’t see the fish, can you?), using the resources at hand—grasshoppers which she and Grandpa caught this afternoon—to procure your needs and wants.

This was all her idea, actually.  She’s been agitating for a fishing excursion since late winter, and finally brought it to a family meeting last week.  So during the meeting we whipped out the schedule book and made a plan, and today we executed that plan.  I believe, based on her high level of interest during the whole several hours of fishing and based on her exclamations of “That was a really good place for fishing!” as we left for home that it can be considered to have met her expectations.

It’s always a little anticlimactic, after such a fun family excursion, to have to gut a bunch of fish.  Well, usually it’s anticlimactic.  What other dad can say that their kids insisted on the privilege of helping to clean the fish?  I even had to promise I wouldn’t start without them (by the way, when Alida heard me say that we’d have to “clean” the fish after catching them, she chimed in that we’d have to clean them “inside and out!”).  I figured they’d each want to try to scale one or two, then go wash up, leaving me with one of “…love’s austere and lonely offices.”  (from Robert Hayden’s, Those Winter Sundays)  Nothing doing.  Read on.

After watching me do one, Kali and I both agreed that the girls shouldn’t try to handle a knife and a slippery fish at the same time.  Alida wasn’t ready to concede the point, but at three and a half I insisted on that one!  But the scaling looked doable to both of them, so I poked my knife through the fish’s tail to hold it in place and Kali was off and scraping.  To my surprise it went just fine.  Much better than last year.  Not to be outdone, Alida on her turn took up the fish scaler with great vim and vigor and proceeded to…scale a fish.  These kids are something else.  She had to hold the thing at about chin level and almost stand on tiptoe to see what she was doing, but so help me the scales came off.  Not too quickly, not completely, but not all that slowly and pretty thoroughly, all told.  I just had to close my mouth, swallow my flabbergast, and stand at the ready to help her flip it over and do the other side when she was done with the first; I will cheerfully ignore any scales I find at lunch tomorrow.

Well as it turns out the girls both seem to like cleaning fish.  After a little initial squeamish fascination on Alida’s part, they quickly adjusted to all the tasks they could manage: taking fish off of the stringer, scaling, picking up fish heads and scooping up piles of scales for the gut bucket, depositing cleaned fish in the basin of water.  Their work was interspersed with lots of questions about and exploration of these creatures so different from ourselves, which they both like to eat so very much.  Kali seemed to be experiencing something like respect and endearment as she stroked the sleek, lifeless forms and commented on their colors.  She wondered what bass are like…how are they the same or different?  I felt I was on holy ground.  Is there anything more precious to humans than this hunger to know about the world?  It is my privilege to accompany them on their quest…at least for the first few years.

At one point during one of her turns, with fish scales a-flying, Alida looked up into my face with some questions:

“Am I learning?...Did I just learn this?”

“Yup.”

“Now I know it?”

“Yup.”

“How to do it?”

“Yup.”

“Carefully?”

“Yup.”

I have nothing useful to add to that.

I think I’m off to a much-needed shower, and then I’ll brush my teeth (without flossing) and crawl into bed a richer man than the one that woke this morning.