Fishing Blind

Something from the tackle box:

       As Jesus and his disciples were going into Bethsaida, some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch the man.  Jesus took him by the hand and led him out of the village, where he spit into the man’s eyes.  He placed his hands on the blind man and asked him if he could see anything.  The man looked up and said, “I see people, but they look like trees walking around.” 

       Once again Jesus placed his hands on the man’s eyes, and this time the man stared.  His eyes were healed, and he saw clearly. (Mark 8:22-25 CEV)

       Nothing on earth is more beautiful than the morning sun.  Even if you live to a ripe old age, you should try to enjoy each day, because darkness will come and will last a long time.  Nothing makes sense.  (Ecclesiastes 11:7-8 CEV)

Delmar and Thelma Carr

       My Grandpa Carr lived into his nineties and for all but the last couple of years of his life he was healthy enough to do a good many of the things that he had always loved to do.  He was ambulatory right through his eighties. He could get out and visit with friends and family, which he liked to do.  He could go out to eat with friends and family, which he loved to do.  And maybe most importantly, he could travel from his farm in southern Michigan to his cottage on Long Lake in northern Michigan where he would relax and fish.

       The only fly in this ointment of an otherwise happy retirement was the fact that for the last fifteen years or so of his life my Grandpa Carr was legally blind from an eye condition known as Macular Degeneration. 

       Macular Degeneration is a strange disease.  It’s not as if you are blind in a way that you can’t see anything at all, as if the world is as black as if you’ve closed your eyes and didn’t let any light get in.  There is light, and you can sort of see things, sometimes, if you don’t look right at them.  But the more you look right at something and try to focus on it the less well you can make it out.  I can remember my Grandpa sitting next to his television set, about two feet from it, and looking away from the screen at about a forty-five degree angle to a spot on the wall.  He couldn’t see a lot of what was going on in the show by doing this, but he could see a lot more than if he looked straight at the television set and tried to focus on what was happening. 

       I first noticed my Grandpa’s vision was slipping when he was driving in his seventies.  He always had a heavy foot on the gas pedal and was much more likely to pass than to be passed, but he got to where he wouldn’t see oncoming vehicles until they were way too close to be passing in front of.  I can remember one instance riding with him where he had pulled out to pass and Grandma and the rest of us had to shout for him to pull back into his own lane so that he wouldn’t get us all killed in a head-on collision.  That was about the last straw.  My Grandpa liked to drive but he also liked to live, so Grandma and his two daughters did all the driving for him over the last decade plus of his life. 

       There are some genetic predisposition factors associated with Macular Degeneration and my Mother, who is now in her eighties, is afflicted with the same disease.  It’s such an odd disorder that it can almost seem comical if it wasn’t so awful.  The last time I was up at the cottage visiting Mom and Dad we went into Cheboygan for lunch, which they do almost every day.  As we are driving through town my mom comments about the man smoking on the sidewalk.  My Dad asks how she can tell he’s smoking.  She says she can see the smoke cloud around his head.  I look over and sure enough, there’s a man with a cigarette blowing billowing puffs of smoke into the air.  We pull up behind a pickup truck at a stoplight and Mom reads one of its bumper stickers without missing a word.  But then, when I ask her what’s written on the giant billboard half a block away – she can’t even make out where the billboard is at, let alone make out any of the three foot tall letters that are on it. 

       When we’re walking into the diner Dad has to take her elbow and lead her right up to the curb, which is painted a bright yellow, and tell her when to step up because she just can’t see where it is.  She’s given up knitting, which she loved to do, because she can’t see well enough to knit any more, but she still plays bridge at least twice a week as she can apparently still see the cards.  Go figure. 

       A couple of weeks ago she was quite sure that a pot of flowers sitting on a tree stump was a man wadding in the water down by our boat dock.  It will continue to get worse.  Macular Degeneration never improves.   Even when one is taking medications for the disease it only gets worse at a slower pace.  I get my eyes examined twice a year and thankfully I’m showing no signs of developing Macular Degeneration as of yet.  But then, I’m only fifty-eight. 

       Anyway, back to my Grandpa and his late years up at the lake house.  As I’ve told you in my previous story, my Grandpa Carr was a bluegill and perch fisherman, an old school cane pole man, who only used worms on plain hooks as bait.  Which – you would think – would be the perfect set-up for poor old blind Grand-pap.  Just set up a lawn chair on the dock after lunch and let the old-timer fiddle around with the guppies that hang out around there until it’s time to bring him in for his afternoon nap.

I still use Grandpa's boat and motor

       Yeah, - right!  My Grandpa Carr wouldn’t be having anything to do with that sort of a deal.  He may have been a cane-pole fisherman, but he liked to fish with that cane-pole out of a boat.  And he would be taking that boat of his to any of the spots around that four hundred acre lake where he knew he might get into some pan fish that were worth cleaning for dinner.  - ‘Nuff said! 

One of his favorite spots was off that point

       Of course, - he’s legally blind.  Now, Grandpa might be willing to let Grandma do the car driving, but he’s not letting her chauffeur him around the lake in his fishing boat.  She wouldn’t have done it anyway.  She liked to sit in the cottage and enjoy some peace and quiet while Grandpa was out fishing (their seventy plus year marriage could accurately be described as ‘cantankerously argumentative’ most of the time).  No, - Grandpa would be skippering his fourteen-foot boat and Mercury outboard engine - sans crew, - and that was that. 

       But the man was blind! He should not be out tearing around a big lake in a motorboat, even if it was just a big rowboat with a twenty-five horsepower outboard engine, - and he knew that.  That’s why he had a system. 

       He would usually go out in the early morning, before the kids on the jet-skis and water skis were even awake, let alone churning up the waters on the lake.  First he would listen for any other boat traffic.  If he heard any at all he would take note and not go in that direction. 

       Once he decided where he was going for the morning, he would putter out at a slow idle only, trolling speed, not much faster than you could have rowed that boat.  He would follow the shoreline even if he were going to a spot directly across the narrowest part of the lake.  It might take a longer time to get where he was going but that was OK. 

       He knew where the landmarks were that he could see, the tall blue house with white trim, the bright yellow pontoon boat, the dock with the flag, the big dead birch tree that leaned way out over the water, only when he got to the landmark he was looking for would he turn and head out into the deeper water where he would anchor, and then he would stay there, not moving until he was done fishing.  Once he was anchored and stationary he didn’t care about the other boats coming out onto the lake.  He was fishing and it was their responsibility to look out for him now.  

       He gave up using bobbers with his cane-pole.  You had to look at a bobber to see what it was doing, and if he looked at it that’s when he couldn’t see it.  So he became an expert in the art of fishing by feel, jigging his hook and line straight down, deep into the water, right next to the boat, and waiting for the tap, tap, tap, - and then the tug – that let him know it was time to set his hook on that big deep swimming perch or sunfish.  He got really good at it, too.  He caught a lot of fish that way.

       Grandpa didn’t really need to see well to take a fish off the hook and toss it in his basket, or to put a new worm back on the hook, he could have done that with his eyes closed anyway, - and maybe he did, just for fun.  With the cane pole he didn’t need to worry about reels with cranks, or lots of line coming off a spool to get all tangled up.  Just lower the baited hook and line straight down, and then pull the fish straight up.

       When he was done fishing he would head directly back towards the shore, which he could make out, until he came to that landmark he had used to find his spot in the first place.  Then he would turn and follow the shoreline back in the opposite direction at a slow idle to his cottage, the yellow house with the big picture window, brown shutters and gray chimney, where he would tie up at the dock and unload his catch for the day. 

       Grandpa would still clean the fish by hand even though he couldn’t see what he was doing.  That was his job.  He scaled, gutted, took the heads off, and washed them up, - and then grandma cooked them, - that was the deal all their lives.  I do have to admit that in those late years, if you were watching, you might catch grandma doing a little clean up work on grandpa’s cleaning job at the kitchen sink before the fish were dusted and fried.  She never did say anything about it to anyone though.  Grandma did love and appreciate her blind fisherman, as adversarial as their relationship could otherwise sound on most topics of discussion.  All in all, it was a good system. 

Something to take home in your creel:

     

       I don’t know why Jesus didn’t completely heal the blind man at Bethsaida on the first go-around when his spit into his eyes.   The poor old fellow had to get a double dose of Jesus’ touch to be restored to complete sight, and as far as I can tell this is the only miraculous healing Jesus ever did that went down like this.  I don’t know why.  Even as a preacher I wouldn’t care to hazard a guess.  It’s just the way it happened as far as I can tell.

       Now there are plenty of sermons and bible study lessons you can read on this story, all of them trying to make good points about the two phased healing process for this particular recipient of God’s grace.  Most of those points seem to have way more to do with defending Christ’s divine omnipotence to do just exactly what he wants to do, whenever he wants to do it, than they do with any life lessons we might be able to get out of the story.  Which fact frustrates me. 

       The arguing points sort of go along these lines.

        “Since the Lord Jesus healed the blind man half way on the first try, and then all the way on the second try, he must of meant to have it happen that way, because he’s the LORD!”

       “Fine, granting that Jesus is Lord, what purpose did he have in doing a halfway first and then all the way?”

       “Obviously to teach the man some lesson!”

       “Well, OK, then what was that lesson?” 

       “The bible doesn’t tell us what the lesson was, so it’s not important that we know.  The important thing is that you believe that Jesus meant to heal him in two stages, because we know that he could have done it in one go if he had meant to do it that way!  He’s the Lord Almighty, and don’t you forget it!”

       “Fine!  Then I’m leaving it alone!” 

       I do not know what lesson Jesus was trying to teach the blind man in Bethsaida, IF that’s what he was trying to do, which I kind of doubt.  I can speculate, as some have done, but without at least some hint that I don’t have that’s all I would be doing. 

       But even though I don’t know what Jesus might have meant by healing this man in two stages, instead of one, I can make an observation about it and note a truth it reveals: 

       It is possible to be abundantly blessed by God, even to the point of being miraculously healed of some affliction by his loving touch, and still not have everything about your life be the way that you wish it was. 

       The kingdom of heaven is real, - and it is near, - it is close at hand, - it might even be here right now within you, praise the Lord.  But, for the time being, while it’s close at hand and even within you, it is only so mixed in with the fallen world as we otherwise live in it.  The wheat is there, but for now it’s there amid the tares. 

       Almost everyone who has lived past the age of thirty or so knows that things don’t just keep getting better and better the longer you go on in life, at least not physically, it just doesn’t work that way.  No matter how hard you work to keep it from happening, something is going to eventually break down and give out.  As the old comedian, Redd Foxx, used to say; “Health nuts are all going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.”

       My grandpa Carr didn’t die of nothing.  His heart, which had always been somewhat suspect, finally gave up on him at the age of almost ninety-two.  But as I’ve said, apart from the last couple of years, he stayed pretty active even though he was blind. 

       Lot’s of folks lose their sight, or their hearing, or lose a limb, or have to use a wheel chair, or on and on with any number of misfortunes that can develop, or befall, or even plague us from the day of our birth.  Some folks don’t do anything after that sort of mishap occurs.  Some folks do some, but not as much as they could do.  And some folks go on and do just as much as they possibly can do even when wisdom might tell them they probably shouldn’t, like taking a motor-boat out fishing on a busy lake by yourself when you’re legally blind.

       I’m not sure what the proper balance is.  I guess it probably depends on whom you ask.  All I’m sure of is that if I ever develop Macular Degeneration, which may very well happen, I want to keep fishing like my grandpa Carr did, - fishing by feel alone if that’s all I have left to me, – and know that I’m blessed by God in my being able to do it.  -  I also hope that I have someone else around who’s willing to drive the boat for me. 

Pot-Hole Fishing

Something from the tackle box: 

       This is what the Lord says:  “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.   But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’”    (Jeremiah 6:16 NIV)

       Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it.  (Proverbs 22:6 NIV)

one of Grandpa's cane poles hanging in the boat house

       My very earliest recollections of fishing go back to the days when I might still have been a pre-schooler, three or four years old or so, right around the year 1960 if I figure right.  I’m not entirely sure because it was a long time ago, but is seems like I might have been that young.

       My Grandpa and Grandma Carr owned a farm near the small town of Dansville, just a half-hour’s drive southeast of the state capital of Lansing.  Grandpa was a good farmer, a very good local politician, and an even better businessman, which meant that he and Grandma prospered in life to a degree that a whole lot of small family farm operators didn’t.  

       I heard stories about some rough years back when my mom was a little girl in the midst of the Great Depression, but in all the years that I knew Grandpa and Grandma there were always two good John Deere tractors in the barnyard, a good pickup truck in the driveway, and a very clean late model Oldsmobile parked in the garage.  The farmhouse was big and clean, with most of the modern amenities of that day, and filled with really nice furniture.  The yards, gardens and outbuildings were always well maintained.  And all of it was usually pretty well paid for.  You had no trouble imagining total strangers driving by and saying to anyone else in the car, “now that is a nice looking prosperous farm,” because it was. 

       I guess I’ve told you all of this so that you’d know that my grandparents, on my mother’s side, were not the kind of country folk who needed to hunt and fish for food, at least not in the years when I knew them.  The fidge, freezer and pantry were always full in Grandma’s house, and they would go out to eat dinner with friends at a really nice restaurant in Lansing at least once a month, if not more often than that. 

       But, that being said, I will tell you that my Grandpa Carr did love to hunt and fish, and both he and my Grandmother loved to eat what was bagged, especially ring-necked pheasant in the fall, and in the summertime, fresh lake caught pan-fish, be it bluegills, sunfish or perch.  They just loved it!

       Now the problem with owning a one-man/one woman farm operation with livestock is that you can’t take a lot of “time off” to go somewhere else to hunt and fish.  The hogs will need to be fed today and tomorrow just as surly as they did yesterday and the day before, so you have to squeeze leisure activities, like hunting and fishing, into those hours when the chores are done for the day, which means you’re also going to stay pretty close to home to do that kind of stuff. 

       For hunting it’s less problematic.  A farmer who likes to hunt, and who is wise enough to leave wide fence rows and good sized wood lots standing on his property to shelter and hold the game, will be able to hunt to his heart’s content without ever leaving his own estate.  But fishing is another matter.  Not everyone has quick and easy access to good fishing waters.  Most of us, farmers included, have to get in a vehicle and go somewhere to fish, which takes the extra time you might not have to give to it every day, even in Michigan, which is among the best places you can live in the United States if you want easy access to fishable waters. 

       There are good-sized fishable lakes with easy public access within a twenty mile drive of almost any place you can be in Michigan, - except for a few places.  Southeastern Ingham county, where my Grandparent’s farm was located, being one of those places.

       Apart from the overdeveloped and overused Lake Lansing, located right next to the city it shares a name with at the very northern edge of Ingham county, there is not a body of water in that whole area that’s even worthy of the title of “lake” in my humble opinion.  There are quite a few pot-holes that claim the title of “lake” which can be found on a map of Ingham County, a good number of them in fact.  But I figure that unless your banks are extensive enough that they can’t be completely enclosed and owned by someone with a one-mule forty acre farm, you ought to rightly be calling yourself a “pond” rather than a “lake.”  And there isn’t too much open water in all of Ingham County that exceeds those dimensions. 

       So, the geographic situation being what it was, if Grandpa and Grandma Carr liked to catch fish, clean ‘em, cook ‘em, and eat ‘em all in the same day on a regular basis, which they did, and if they needed to do that within the time restraints of their daily life on the farm, which they also did, then pot-hole fishing it would be!  There was no way around it.  And that’s where I come into the story as a small child.

       Now, if you drove about two miles south from my Grandparent’s farm on the road that would eventually take you into Stockbridge, you would come to a place called Millville, which wasn’t a “ville” at all.  There was, and I believe still is, a Methodist church there sitting in the middle of a cornfield like so many little Methodist churches in rural Michigan do.  And, at that time, there was also an old country store there.  The really old fashioned kind of country store, like the one that Sam Drucker ran on the “Green-Acres” TV show.  And that was it!  There was nothing else to Millville, - at all.

       But if you drove south to Millville, parked your car at the country store, and then walked east down a dirt lane about a quarter of a mile or so, you came to one of those little pot-hole lakes that had a dock jutting out into it, along with a couple of beat-up old rowboats tied up there if my memory serves me right. 

       I’m not sure if anyone and everyone in the community had access to that fishing hole, or if my Grandpa Carr had special permission that other folks didn’t have.  All I know is, that when I was very young, that pot-hole pond behind the Millville store was where most of the pan-fish dinners that got eaten at my Grandma’s table came from.  

       And I can remember being taken down there when I was very young and being allowed to hoist those little fish out of the water with a cane pole from the end of that dock knowing that, if in Grandpa’s judgment the fish was big enough to keep, we’d be eating that same fish before we went to bed that night, - and – that I would be part and parcel to the whole process. 

       Grandpa was a pretty good teacher if you were interested in learning.  He would let you watch whatever he did, explaining to you what he was doing as you were watching, long before you were ready to do it yourself, even if you were willing. 

       I knew how to put a worm on a hook long before I was ready to actually put a worm on a hook, or even be allowed to really handle fishing hooks at all.  I knew how to take a bluegill off a hook without getting my hands stung by his spines long before my hands were big enough to fit around a fish.  I knew how to scale a fish long before you would have wanted me to be scaling any fish that you were going to eat.  I knew how to cut up and clean a fish long before you would allow me to handle anything so sharp as a fishing knife.  So when the time was right, I could just start doing all of that on my own.

       Now, this does not mean that I knew everything about fishing from before the time I could actually go out and do it on my own.  Far from it!  My Grandpa Carr loved to fish, and he shared that with me, but his ideas of good fishing were very one-dimensional.

       I never saw my Grandpa Carr, in his whole life, fish with any other tackle than a cane pole, hook and worm, and he fished until he was almost ninety years old.  He never used anything other than earthworms for bait that I ever saw.  I never heard of my Grandpa fishing for anything other than pan-fish with that cane pole and baited hook.  There might be big bass, or pike, or walleye, or trout, or catfish in a lake, and he might occasionally hook and land one of them, but it would be an accident when it happened because he never went after them.  He was after bluegills, red-eared Sunfish and perch, - period. 

       And most emphatically, my Grandpa would never dream of filleting a fish.  That was a huge waste of meat in his opinion.  The mere mention of filleting a fish would make him mutter under his breath.  Every fish he ever caught that didn’t get thrown back was first scaled, then gutted, then the head and fins were cut off, and then it got thoroughly scrubbed with cold water from a garden hose before it was ready for Grandma to coat with some cornmeal and toss in the frying pan.  That is the way it always happened with no exception.  When you ate those pan-fried pan-fish you picked the bones out as you went along.  That’s just how it was done, - every - single – time that you ate some of Grandpa’s fish. 

       So, at about the age of nine, when my father started taking me to Canada to do the kind of fishing that he liked to do, trolling for walleye and northern pike with all kinds of artificial lures attached to the line feeding out of a bait-casting rod and reel set up, catching fish that would be filleted and the big boneless slabs of white meat carried home in coolers packed with ice to be stored in a freezer and then eaten any time of the year you felt like fish, I pretty much figured that cane poles, bobbers, and angle worms, were for old men and little babies.  After that, I did not do much fishing with my Grandpa Carr, in fact, practically none, which is pretty sad when you think about it.

       It’s not as horribly bad as it sounds, though.  My Grandpa and I weren’t “estranged,” or anything like that, there would be a couple of decades of good times pheasant hunting together ahead of us, but his idea and my idea of what constituted a good time fishing had gone in completely different directions, and I was too immature, and he was too stubborn, to compromise our opinions for the sake of fishing companionship.  It was a mistake. 

The place my Grandpa bought up near Cheboygan when I was a teenager

       As I mentioned earlier, my Grandpa Carr lived into his nineties and was fishing well into his eighties.  When he was in his sixties he shut down his hog operation and just planted corn, which gave him a lot more free time to hunt and fish.  In his seventies he started leasing his fields to another farmer and could do whatever he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it.  He and Grandma bought a summer home on a very nice inland lake in Cheboygan County, where there are really big fishing lakes all over the place, including a Great Lake just a ten minutes drive from the cottage.  Grandpa could now fish for most any kind of fish that Michigan waters had to offer right out of his back door.  But he didn’t. 

       When my Grandparents were up at the cottage in those later years, my Grandpa would fish almost every day that the weather permitted it.  And what he would do would be to get in his own boat, at his own dock, putter out to different spots on his own four-hundred acre pot-hole, put down his anchor, and fish for bluegills, sunfish, and perch with his cane-pole and a can of night-crawlers.  If his fishing had been good that day, he’d prepare them for Grandma to cook that day, just like he always had.  That’s what he did until he couldn’t do it any more, and I’ll be telling you more about that in my next story. 

       I would watch him, but I didn’t go out with him.  If I went out myself I would be casting for bass with crank-baits, or trolling for pike and walleye with artificial minnows and spoon lures.  If my fishing had been good that day I’d be filleting those fish so you didn’t have to pick out the bones as you ate them.  Grandpa and I would eat each other’s fish, but we wouldn’t fish for, or clean each other’s fish, the way the other wanted. 

My Grandpa's beautiful 400 acre pot-hole viewed from the porch of our cottage

       My Grandpa Carr passed away about twelve years ago now, just a couple of years after he couldn’t go fishing any longer because of his failing health.  Grandma left us just a year later.  The cottage they bought up in the inland lakes country of Cheboygan County now belongs to my parents and I.  And, as you know, I go up there a lot, - and fish. 

       My ideas of what constitutes a good day of fishing have changed a lot in recent years.  I now love to fish for pan-fish just as much as my Grandpa did.  Ninety percent of the fishing I do now is for those small and tasty little fish. 

Here's who I like to fish for 'gills!

      I still prefer more sophisticated tackle than my Grandpa used, my favorite way to catch bluegills being on a nice lightweight graphite fly-fishing rig, a thing my Grandpa would have shunned as a rich man’s toy.  But to putter out in his old boat, anchor in one of his old spots on our four hundred acre fishing pond, and then spend all day catching a mess of bluegills, sunfish and perch to pan-fry, is a pleasure I now hold as dear as he did.  I’ll even take one of his old cane-poles out every now and then and use that, just because I think it would have pleased him, – though I still insist on filleting any fish that I keep.  -  Sorry about that, Grandpa. 

Something to take home in your creel:

       I have pre-school grandchildren of my own now.  The oldest will be starting kindergarten this fall.  Last summer, when he was four, we started fishing together. He seems to like it really well.  He is my best fishing buddy now and he knows it. 

       The time will come when I take him to places where we just might catch some big fish if we’re savvy fishermen, but for now I take him to places like where my Grandpa first took me, places where I know we’ll most likely catch a lot of little fish to throw back into the water with very little effort. 

       We started out with cane-poles last year, a six-footer for him and a nine-footer for me.  I would bait his hook, but he would hand me the worm and watch me each time I put a new one on.  I would take the fish off the hook for him, but I would show and explain how I was doing it without getting poked by dorsal spines each time.

       This year, at age five, he’s using a little spin-casting rod, and often gets his bobber, hook and bait somewhere in the general area that he intends to.  Although practicing common courtesy to the other fisherpersons in the near vicinity when he makes his casts still needs to be stressed pretty regularly. 

       He is still too small to hold even a small bluegill in one hand while removing the hook with his other hand.  But once I’ve gotten the fish off the hook for him he will sometimes take it in both hands and toss it back into the water for himself.  

       He has seen and understands what I have to do to get those few fish that we do keep ready to cook and eat the way I do it.  Some day I may even show him how to scale and clean one the way my Grandpa did it, just so he knows there’s more than one way to clean a fish. 

       And I hope against hope, when the day comes that he can teach me something new about fishing, I will be as enthusiastic about fishing with him, the way he likes to fish, as he is right now about fishing with me the way I like to fish. 

Introduction to a Fisherman's Tales

       I worked a regular job from the time I was twenty-one until I was forty-six years old. It was blue-collar work and I put in lots of overtime.  I also like to think that I invested significant time in assisting my wife for all those years in raising our three children into the fine examples of the human race which they have turned out to be.  That was as it should have been. 

     Although I have enjoyed hunting, fishing and other outdoor activities for my entire life, the necessities of those times kept me from reflecting on these leisure pursuits with much more depth of thought than simply thanking God for the pleasant days that they added to my life.  Probably that was as it should have been as well.

     Today, at the age of fifty-eight, I have now been the preacher and pastor of the little Congregational church in the village of Lake Odessa Michigan for over twelve years.  A decade plus of full time reflection on life, scripture, faith, and the human condition, all to the end of getting something worthwhile about our relationships to God and one another into a coherent enough format that people will want to listen to it on a Sunday morning.  It’s still full-time work, but of a very different texture than what I did for a living in my blue-collar days. 

      My Grandpa Carr, an avid fisherman in the later years of his life on earth, was known to say that any story worth telling - is worth embellishing. While I don’t advocate out and out lying, all fishermen and fisherwomen will accept the necessity to embellish a fish story to make an impression.  That’s the whole reason that one tells a fish story in the first place.  There’s not much point in telling someone that you caught a half dozen six inch bluegills that afternoon.  You may have had more fun in doing it than you’ve had in a month of Sundays, but if it wasn’t a big mess of NINE inchers no one else wants to hear about it, regardless of the great time that you had!  People who love to fish all know this.

     Most of my fish stories are pretty factual.  Some of them are totally factual.  Others are, admittedly, a bit less so.  Even though all of my stories are based on the real people, places and events of my life, I am not against embellishing a story, or combining two good stories into one great story, if it gets the point I’m trying to make across better.

     So, if you were a participant in any of the adventures that I relate, or if you are in possession of irrefutable information that might contradict any part of one of my fish stories, please have the grace to know that as a ‘fisher of men’ I might have points to make with these stories that are more important than the difference between the eighteen inch brown trout that I caught and the twelve inch brown trout that you remember watching me catch.  

       Thank you. 

              M.J.