The Princess and the fish

The Hero believes that we should be preparing for retirement, which, with the current economic climate, is about eight decades away for us personally. We are good savers, but he feels there is more we should be doing.


"Like what?" I said.


"Fly fishing," he said.


This stems from his feeling that, in addition to money, we will need hobbies during retirement, and that we should start developing interests now so we can be ready to jump into them full-time when the time comes. Since by current calculations we will be pushing age 127 when we can retire, it is uncertain what kind of interests we could develop now that would still be relevant by that point. Maybe napping.


In the interest of finding an activity we both enjoy, and could see ourselves possibly doing long term, we took a lesson in: fly fishing. 


I admit that I did not think of this as something in which I would find a great level of interest. But after a couple of hours spent standing in the drizzling rain, prying my line off the bushes and trees behind us, and being unable to account for the continual loss of bait on my line, I was SURE this was something I was not interested in.


Our guide for this excursion was D.J., a well-seasoned fisherman who presumed that we possessed a much greater knowledge of fishing than was actually the case. During our lesson, for instance, he kept throwing out advanced fishing terms, like pole, cast, reel in, watch where you cast, OUCH!, etc., and expecting us to immediately understand what he was talking about. 


Oddly, D.J. believed that my goal during this lesson was to catch fish. Actually my goals were more along the lines of a) not having any personal contact with fish and b) DEFINITELY not having any personal contact with bait.


Actually, my preferred method of fishing, though I did not share this with D.J., is to dump the entire bucket of bait into the water. This way the fish will have no reason to bite my hook, because if they did I would have do something, like thrust my pole into someone else's hands and gesture frantically: "Here. Fish. Get it off."


Eventually the fish and I reached an agreement. I would let them take the bait on my line -- which D.J. had placed there -- without jerking the pole, and they would avoid getting hooked. Everybody was happy for a while, until D.J., noting a great deal of activity on my line about which I was doing nothing, kept telling me to "Jerk! Jerk!" At least I THINK he was using it as a verb.


At one point when D.J. left to give some tips to the Hero, who was some distance away, disaster struck. After all my efforts to the contrary, I caught a fish.


I attempted to encourage the fish to get off the hook on its own, using time-honored, universal fish language ("Shoo."). This did nothing. Finally, since there was no help forthcoming from D.J., I made a fateful decision: I would have to touch the fish.


I laid down some ground rules for both of us first. The fish could not wiggle -- I was very firm on this point -- and I would try not to kill it.


I very slowly grasped the fish, hoping I was not squeezing any vital organs -- and trying not to think about what I might be squeezing -- and attempted to take the hook out of its mouth. The fish, interpreting this as a hostile maneuver, wiggled violently, whereupon I started shrieking. These steps were repeated several times, and soon degenerated into my blubbering to the fish about how very sorry I was to be treating it in this manner, and that whoever had invented the hook in the first place ought to have one put in HIS mouth and see how HE likes it, and above all to please please not die on me. 


Finally, concerned that it had been out of the water too long, I threw the fish back in, hook and all. Once it hit the water it immediately took off for parts unknown, or would have, had it and my line not gotten stuck firmly under a rock.


Efforts to reach the rock and lift it up were unfruitful. I yelled to D.J., and in elaborate gestures gave him to understand that my line was caught and that I needed him NOW.


"Ya got a fish on there!" he said when he picked up the rock, as if I was not aware of this already. He gave the fish a once-over and pronounced it "done in." 


"I killed a fish," I said later to the Hero.


"That's kind of the point of fishing," he said.


"But not with a rock!" I wailed. "Now when I fill out forms and I have to say if I ever committed a felony, I'll have to admit I'm a murderer."


The Hero, having had better luck than I at fishing, is looking forward to more of it. Me, I think I'll stick to napping.