North Star Writers Group

My father never taught me how to fish. He didn’t teach me how to fish because he hated fishing almost as much as he hated golf, onions, automobiles that weren’t made by General Motors and Republicans.

It wasn’t that Dad didn’t like fish. He loved fish. Trouble is, he preferred his fish deep fried with a heaping mound of French fries and a pile of cole slaw on the side. It wasn’t a total loss, though. At least Dad taught me how to eat fish. I can still hear him saying, “All right, son. You take your fish like this, see, then you slather it with lots of tartar sauce and . . .

It was my Uncle Don who taught me how to fish. Uncle Don was a lean, lanky man of few words who owned a cottage on Cedar Lake near Oscoda, Michigan. When I was a kid in the 1940s, I spent a week or two every summer at Uncle Don’s place, and that’s where I learned the difference between a perch and a catfish and how to attach a wriggling minnow with an incredible will to live to a fish hook.

Those were good times at Cedar Lake, especially when you were out on the water real early in the morning and bass were jumping all around you. We always hit the lake early, when mist was rising from the dark water. The air smelled of pine. Fluffy white clouds were piled like clean laundry in a hard blue sky. We often pulled fat perch from the lake. It wasn’t uncommon to catch two, maybe three fish with the same cast.

Later, when I had a family of my own, I taught all four of my children how to fish. The only one who had trouble grasping the subtle intricacies of angling was my daughter Laurie, who’s now 42. I introduced her to fishing one summer when we were staying at a cottage on Lake Huron not far from Uncle Don’s place. We were fishing from a dock and in less than an hour, Laurie, who was 7 at the time, landed four or five keepers. When we returned to our rental cottage, she peered into the bucket where the fish were sloshing around. “What are we going to name the fishies, Daddy?” she asked. I stared at her.

“Name them?” I said.

“Sure,” she chirped, still staring into the bucket. “I think the big fishy should be named Spotty. And we could call the little one . . .um . . . Swimmy. Yes, Swimmy is a good name, isn’t it Daddy?”

When I slid the fillet knife from its sheath, Laurie let out a blood-curdling scream. “What are you doing?” she said.

“I’m going to clean the fish,” I replied.

She eyed me for a moment, then asked “Do you have to . . .kill them when you . . .um . . clean them?”

“Yes, because if I don’t they will flip off your plate at the dinner table,” I said, trying to make a joke.

She burst into tears. I sighed and put the knife away.

“Would you like to take the fish back down to the lake and put them in the water?” I asked.

"Uh-huh,” Laurie replied, stifling a sniffle.

I picked up the bucket and hand-in-hand we trudged back across the sand to the water.

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This is Column # BB18. Request permission to publish here.