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.