(Author’s note: I’ve been binge watching The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy on YouTube for the past several weeks, and it’s just possible that all the stories I’ve written in that same time period are actually variations on some of those episodes, and not part of my own life at all. My spongy brain retains cartoon tropes very easily. Good thing I haven’t been binge watching Sex and the City!)
Is there anything as bright and promising and glorious as a Sunday morning in summer when you’ve got some fishing planned? I mean for the godless heathen, of course. The good Christian, naturally, rejoices in the spirit and fellowship of church services. Which is what I do nowadays. But before I joined the LDS Church I was most certainly a godless heathen -- and boy oh boy how I reveled in those godless heathen fishing Sundays!
Up until the age of twelve I had to attend Catholic Mass with my mom and my two sisters, Sue Ellen and Linda. I always found the whole thing ludicrous and boring. First of all, it was all in Latin. Second, they wouldn’t leave you alone, to maybe catch forty winks sitting in your pew, but kept ringing little bells to signify standing up time or kneeling time. And then the chapel at Saint Lawrence Church in Southeast Minneapolis was, to my sensitive mind, a gloomy and forbidding crypt. The walls were lined with old lithographs of The Stations of the Cross -- a very far cry from Dr. Seuss illustrations, I can tell you that. It was always dark in there, and all those little candles flickering in their red glass cups cast lurid shadows on the walls. Back in those bad old days Sunday clothes were starched and ironed and fitted like some kind of garrote. My Buster Browns pinched my feet; my wool slacks chaffed like sandpaper and left a red welt around my waist; and my white shirt collar bit into my tender neck like a hacksaw.
I was finally manumitted when my mother got into an argument with Father Applebaum over some trivial point of doctrine like transubstantiation; she never attended Mass again, contenting herself with a subscription to Maryknoll magazine. We kids were left to our own devices on Sundays, instead of being roped into attending Mass. And for me that meant fishing.
I was alway mad to go fishing. Give me a bamboo pole and a can of worms and nothing else mattered. Not even catching fish mattered -- just sitting under a welcoming tree with the play of light on the water and the splashy sounds of frogs and turtles; the breeze tickling the cattails; the smell of fermenting mud; twas a very heaven for a lazy daydreaming boy like myself.
I took the bus to Como Lake at Como Park and fished off the modest pier for sunnies and perch. Those old Minneapolis bus drivers were an unpredictable lot. When my luck was good I would haul my catch onto the bus back home, dripping slime and scales all over the bus floor. Most drivers asked me what I was using for bait and were clearly envious of my carefree existence. I was living the life of Riley, they said. But there were some bad apples, as always.
“Hey kid!” they’d yell at me as I dripped fish ooze on the way to my seat. “Keep that bleeping bleep off my bleeping floor, you bleep of a bleep!” Bus drivers had quite the colorful vocabulary back in those days. And they all pretty much looked like Ralph Kramden. I remember one of ‘em even stalked back to me, grabbed my fish, and threw them out the bus window. Bus drivers not being part of the human race, or so my mother said, I didn’t let it bother me.
Fishing Sundays only got better when my best friend Wayne Matsuura got his driver’s license. His dad let him borrow the car on Sundays to drive the fifteen miles to Lake Minnetonka.
Now there is a lake, by jumping jupiter! It covers over fourteen thousand acres in a wide ranging pattern of bays, inlets, and marshy canals. Pooling our meager resources together, we would rent a boat and head out to Crystal Bay to hunt down the black crappie. There were no limits on black crappie back then. Catching them was about as easy as falling off a log. You baited your hook with a worm, lowered the line twenty feet, waited a few minutes, and bingo, you had a crappie thrashing away. We’d haul in twenty in a few hours, easy. Then we’d motor around the big lake for a while, drinking in the boisterous wind and relishing the slap of the waves against our boat. It made me feel like a Viking getting ready to pillage Lindisfarne.
Back home, sunburnt and reeking of decomposing worms, we gutted and filleted the crappie on a newspaper-covered picnic table in Wayne’s backyard. Wayne’s mom would fry ‘em up in sesame oil and serve ‘em to us, hot and hot. With pickled rice balls covered in seaweed. And a pitcher of black cherry Kool Aid, mixed with a bottle of Bubble Up to wash it all down with. Don’t tell me that ain’t living the life of Riley!
Of course, there were Sundays when Wayne’s family needed the car to go visit relatives. Back in those less prodigal times a family had one car, ONE car, no more. Just like all the houses on our block had one bathroom, ONE bathroom, not two. Nobody in our neighborhood was King Farouk, y’know.
On those car-free Sundays I’d hoof it down to the Mighty Mississip to angle for carp and bullheads. Funny thing about bullheads; they take a long time to expire out of the water. One Sunday I brought home a mess of bullheads and dumped them in the cast iron laundry sink in the basement, intending to gut them later. Nasty things to gut and fillet, too. You have to pull their slimy, scaleless skin off with a pair of pliers. Anyway -- I got caught up with watching Ed Sullivan with the rest of the family, then What’s My Line, and then Candid Camera. I kinda forgot about the bullheads in the basement and went to bed instead. Early the next morning, being Monday and wash day, my mother went into the basement to start a load of laundry. In the early morning murk she didn’t notice the quiescent bullheads lurking in the sink until she dumped a basket of underwear on top of them to presoak. The bullheads suddenly came back to life, flipping and flopping like a house afire.
When this incident was described to me by my mother a few minutes later, in a piercing shriek that included, I thought, way too much invective of a personal nature, I couldn’t help breaking into a big grin and giggling. It sounded to me like one of those innocent, merry incidents people sent in to Reader’s Digest. This, it turned out, was a mistake. I was sent to the basement, to sort out the bullheads from the underwear, then to dispose of the bullheads by burying them in the backyard garden, and then banished to my room without either breakfast or lunch.
And wouldn’t you know it, when I came down to dinner famished that night, mom had made fish sticks. I didn’t realize until then that mothers knew how to practice irony . . .
Bleep!
