A fish story.....

I’ve never really been much of a fisherman, prob’ly because I don’t like fish....well, lemme clarify, I don’t like to ‘eat’ fish, otherwise, I like ‘em fine...matter of fact, I quite like them in aquariums ‘n one of my unrealized ambitions is t’do some snorkeling...maybe even scuba diving at some point in my life...at this point in my life, I’ve pretty much given up some of my earlier ambitions...most of them were pretty childish anyway....I was reminded of ‘em when I saw the movie, ‘The Bucket List’.....y’know, a list of things that you want to get done before you die....that type of list is something that you gotta be young to make....old people don’t really do stuff like that....a bucket list for an old person would consist of hanging on as long as possible...anyways, to get back to the fishing thing, once upon a time I took up flyfishing...my son, Dave, when he was young, gave me a fly rod ‘cause he wanted to go fishing...which is a pretty good reason, come to think on it...anyways, the only trout I ever in my life tasted was one that he caught at Little Grass Valley Lake high in the Sierra....Oh, I fished...I read some books ‘n watched some films ‘n I learned how to cast ‘n I enjoyed flyfishing...well, I enjoyed clambering ‘round ‘n about cold mountain streams, casting flies into sundry pools wherein lurked the crafty trout...I never caught anything....well, I caught a lot of branches, my ear ‘n once, I caught my nose...the ear was painful ‘n the nose even more so....the branches just ate flies ‘n line but it was an experience ‘n I had fun....I use’ta buy a fishing licence every year but finally it got too expensive for me to continue....well, I tho’t it was too expensive since I didn’t really go fishing to catch fish...
‘sfunny, I guess, since I grew up on a river...well, in a riverside village on the south bank of the Ohio ‘n back in that way back when time of WWll, most people not only had victory gardens but augmented their diets with fish from the river...a number of people ran tr’ot lines, as they called them in those halycon days ‘n ev’ry boy (me included) carried a fishing line in his pocket....the poles were universally willow ‘n taken as needed...it wasn’t called ‘flyfishing’ back then, it was just fishing but as I got into the mystique of flyfishing, I discovered that basically what it was, was fishing....a line, a hook ‘n some kind of weight, be it a stone, a piece of lead or whatever a kid could come up with to weight his line...’n of course, that’s what flyfishing is....a line tied to the end of a flexible stick with a hook on the end ‘n a dream...the dream, of course, being that you actually catch something other than your ear or your nose...anyways, it’s great fun to wander a mountain stream for a few hours whether you catch anything or not......