Fishing

            There was no beer to make the sun drag its body faster. My father never drank beer in front of me. I’m honestly not even sure if he’s ever had more than one beer in one sitting in his entire life. It is ironic how things change when parents’ habits reach a dirt fork in their children’s minds.

            “You’re tying it wrong. Let me do it”

            My father never revealed himself when he was supposed to. It was almost as if he would only crack the seal when he knew there would be an unspoken time limit on the subject—which was good, because he easily drifted though incongruous topics.

            “Your granddad and I caught a lot of fish with these rods.”

            I nodded enough to resemble a listening son, but I thought about the crawdads in the lake-water shadows, my kind-of girlfriend, my summer vacation waving as it passed, etc. I was bored.

            My hopes for catching a fish would have put me at the edge of the rocks my ass now resented, had I had better luck in the past. Having never caught a fish in my life, I was wary of my father’s excitement when, weeks before, he triumphantly handed his waders and our poles down to me from the attic. He was gentle with the goods and cautioned me to treat them the same as if we were taking them to the Antiques Road Show to have them appraised. We both knew the rods—along with the rest of our rusting possessions huddled in the house—weren’t worth anything, but still, there is some pride in that alone.

            “I think I got somethin’.”

            Why do all fishermen say that? Just a nibble. Story of my life.

            Maybe he resented me for not talking. He always has been and always will be a talker, a “people person.” I always have not been and always will not be one. However, I congratulate him for attempting to pry open a treasure chest of conversations that never existed to begin with. It was, and still is a noble task; ask my ex-girlfriends.

            He worked his summers as a boat boy until there was nothing left: tying boats to the dock; bringing engines out of the boathouse for hobbyists, retired men, and lonely women using fishing as their antidepressant (I know…it’s strange.); and getting “cute” girls’ phone numbers. Five, two, zero, five, two, four, seven, something, something, something. (Up North, any girl who doesn’t weigh over 180 pounds is cute. It’s a different standard, which might explain the insurmountable list of divorcees now living in the Phoenix area. Go up North, find a cute girl, get hitched, move to the city, find cuter girls, get divorced, miss the girl who used to be cute. A cycle.)

            My uncle—he’s my second cousin, but I call him my uncle—now runs the boathouse my dad worked at. It’s been in our family for decades. My great-grandfather used to run it. For a small period of time, I even considered following my father through the vaguely lit stories he still lingers on, but once back in the city, the idea did not appeal. (The cycle had not caught me, yet, or maybe it did, just in a peculiar way.)

            “How’s your girlfriend? What’s her name, again?”

            “She’s good.”

            Years later, I found the lyrics to a song my dad wrote in my late granddad’s dulcimer case. He taught my father how to play, though my father still doesn’t know how to all that well.

            I never used to sense jealousy in him (hell, I wish I could catch fish like that), but as the great Father Time wore into us, things nestled like parasites in our spines, and the cycle hit us both in a different way.