The last time I went fishing, I was 12 and accompanied by four other 12 year old girls. It was my friend Midi’s birthday party. She lived on this completely sick horse farm in Darien, and there was a pond across the street stocked with who knows what kind of fish. It’s safe to say these fish of indeterminate origin were unprepared for an encounter with a small army of pre-teen girls. It disappoints my oldest son to no end that I don’t remember more of this story, but this is roughly how it went. One of us was holding the fishing rod as the lure and hook dangled salaciously (well, to a fish, I guess) in the murky water. We were surprised flabbergasted rendered incapable of any kind of communication other than shrieking when we actually caught a fish.
I don’t remember how we got the fish off the hook. I want to say I was brave enough to grab its body and hold it still as I gently removed the hook from its mouth and tossed it back into the murky depths. But I’m pretty sure I’d be making that part up. I do remember the whole experience was enough to keep us up chattering into the late hours (it was a sleepover) as we played Titanic, a fun and extremely involved 1970s board game I never came across anywhere else besides Midi’s house.
When we were lifeguards, my friend Joe and I feared hearing one thing more than anything else: “Hey lifeguard, I’ve got a fish hook in my eye. I think I need some first aid.” We developed a Universal Symbol for Fish Hook in Eye (with your forefinger slightly curled, stick it just under your brow bone and hold on tight while making your most grotesque facial expression) and waited vigilantly for our first victim patient. Of course, we also spent our time waiting for a commercial airliner to fall out of the sky and (conveniently) into the Long Island Sound so we could see exactly how long it would take us to row out a few miles to grab all those survivors. I can safely attribute our love for the macabre to being bored out of our skulls.
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