Terry Madewell/Clarendon Citizen
Father and son come to cents & sense-ability
It’s funny how things work out in life. The old adage that “what goes around, comes around,” is certainly true if you have the patience to let nature run her course. While sometimes this adage is reserved for bad people finally getting what they’re due, what I’m talking about is good people getting the good stuff. The stuff that makes sense.
My dad is spending two weeks in South Carolina with us and he turns 90 this weekend on May 28. He’s literally been in a frenzy over catching fish. Catfish, bream, perch, crappie … it doesn’t matter. He’s ready to go every time I get a free moment.
My, it is interesting how things have changed through the years of my life.
When I was young, my dad was not into fishing for fun. He would sometimes calculate how much it cost me per pound to catch fish, and sometimes, the cost was pretty high in terms of “dollars and cents.”
But to me, during my youth and right into my ripe old age now, it was more about the “sense” it made to have so much fun and not so much about the monetary “cents.”
Back then, from dad’s perspective, fishing for meat to eat was OK but it needed to be a pretty good outing to be cost efficient. I don’t think my catches measured up very often when I was very young. But as I grew into my teen years and started catching some big coolers of fish, I remember occasionally making the cost-effective grade.
I never let that bother me, it was just fun and I was passionate about fishing.
It is very apparent to me now what was occurring back then. When I was a teenager and fishing so much, Dad was working a hard job and working very hard at it. He was proud to have a job. He had spent his youth through the peak of the depression some 80 odd years ago, so his mindset was formed during the years when life was really tough. It was a time that now only a few can recall when actually getting an apple and an orange for Christmas was truly a blessing.
Dad had different values from a financial standpoint. I was most fortunate to have two parents who worked to support our family. We were far from wealthy, but were solidly middle class. Mom and Dad could afford to let me mow yards to make “cricket money” so I could go fishing. As I look back now, I know that it wasn’t that way for them when they grew up.
Maybe it was my undying passion for fishing that finally converted dad to the “sense” side from the “cents.”
Or maybe it was a combination of Mom and I. Mom, when I was about 20, really began to get into fishing and she had a ball catching bream, crappie, catfish, bass and stripers. She would go with me on a regular basis and we’d come back aglow with stories of catching fish, the big one that got away, and sometimes even toting the big one that didn’t get away.
Through the years dad morphed into a true fisherman.
First, he would go with me, or me and Mom. But then he started going on his own. In fact, he became quite proficient either from the boat or the bank and his passion was bream fishing. His friends began to call him the “Bream King of Chickamauga Lake,” the big TVA lake near Chattanooga, where I grew up and where he still lives today. He and Mom and a cabin on the lake, so going fishing was literally as easy as walking out the back door.
Since that time, he’s moved away from the lake and seldom gets to go anymore on his own. But last year he came down twice to South Carolina for a couple weeks at a time and began to renew the passion for fishing.
He’s back again now and we’re fishing every day. As I write this piece, we’ve just returned from fishing for a few hours, catching about 150 bream and culling out the best 40 or so to keep. I will fillet those later and then we’ll have some fine dining on bream fillets in the very near future.
We’ll probably hit a different bream bed late this evening. Tomorrow morning we’re going catfishing, hopefully for a repeat performance of our trip two days ago when we caught a big mixed bag of blue and channel catfish.
Watching the pure joy of my dad catching fish one after another, whether it’s too small to keep or a big, bull bream, is one of life’s great pleasures. I love to take kids fishing and enjoy seeing the pure joy they exhibit of catching fish solely for the fun of catching fish. I can also say the same about my 90-year-old dad.
Hearing him say today, “Wow, that was a lot of fun. How many do you think we caught, I didn’t even try to keep up? I was too busy just catching fish. Let me rest a little while and we’ll go again.”
Yes, he really “gets” the joy and passion of it. Getting into a red-hot bream bed and losing track of time finally makes perfectly good “sense” to both father and son.
