Bob

Batz

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March 20, 2009

Grandpa’s Eternal Fishing Gear

It’s 2 p.m. on a winter afternoon and I’m puttering around in my garage.

The temperature outside is 7 degrees. Snowflakes the size of Buicks are swirling in a battleship-gray sky.

Puttering around in an un-heated garage isn’t the most exciting way to spend a blustery winter afternoon, but, hey, it sure beats watching the “soaps” on TV. It’s a perfect day to spend some time in the garage because my first wife Sally is at work and Matilda, our Malti-Poo, is napping on the back of the living room couch.

As I have done during many, many past garage putterings, I begin this afternoon by cleaning work-bench drawers, washing windows and sweeping the floor. Then, as I prepare to check out the contents of several cardboard boxes stacked in a corner, I see it, sitting alone on a dusty shelf.

It is my favorite tackle box, and it catches my eye on this dreary day because it is a splash of bright green in the midst of lots of boring brown and gray garage-type things. I put the tackle box on the garage shelf in late fall after another season of fishing had become nothing but fond memories. 

I reach up and bring the box down and as soon as I open it, I spot the old frog lure lying there forgotten as a John McCain campaign promise.

Like always, the vintage lure immediately brings back fond memories of my grandfather Elmer Dobbs, who was quite a fisherman until he became too old to take to the lakes, rivers and streams any more.

Every time I spent a night in my grandparents’ big old house on Page Street in Flint, Michigan in the late 1940s, I would ask – no, make that beg – my Grandpa Elmer to lead me down the narrow and rickety stairs to his cellar to look at his five tackle boxes that overflowed with old and interesting lures and all sorts of other fascinating fishing things. And, without fail, my grandfather always complied with my wishes and we’d be down there until my grandmother called us for dinner.

I always dreamed that some day I would have my grandfather’s incredible collection of fishing doodads and whatchamacallits. That dream was encouraged by my grandfather, an always-smiling and gray-haired wisp of a man who often told me “When I’m gone, Robbie, all of these will fishing things will be yours.”

When I was really young, I didn’t have the foggiest idea what he meant by the words “when I’m gone” but it always made me smile when he told me I would someday inherit his fishing paraphernalia.

You see, we had this special bond, my grandfather and me. That bond was fishing.

He was a wonderful teller of fish tales and I was a wonderful listener. The years, like those afternoons in my grandfather’s basement, passed quickly, or so it seemed to me anyway, and then one day when I was 11, maybe 12, my grandfather died.

He was laid to rest after a really nice funeral. A few weeks after he passed away, I made my way down the still-rickety stairs to his basement and much to my disappointment, all of his fishing gear was gone.

I never did figure out where it went . . . but I like to think my grandfather took it with him.

Contact Bob at bbatz@woh.rr.com

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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