We had picked politics cleaner than a dog bone, knew enough to stop complaining about the encroachment of progress because “it’s just not the way things used to be,” accepted that weather cozies up to us or clobbers us, and instead chose to talk about something dear to one of us.
Crappie fishing.
There were three chairs in a space big enough for two, which meant we were close enough to hear each other the first time.
Crappie fishing, as we all know, is easy. The hard part is finding them. And then setting a hook in the skinny membrane around the mouth or getting it to swallow a jig. Other than all that, it’s easy. And at least a girl doesn’t have to battle a brutal bass or stress shoulder muscles trying to land a catfish.
Crappie are also called panfish, white perch, and papermouth, or as Cajuns call them, sac-a-lait. Sack full of milk?
Apparently, according to a good-sized songwriter and guitar player who drove through snow and ice two weeks ago to play an old and expensive Martin guitar at a Fayetteville music shop, and who we hadn’t seen in forever, said the reason to eat crappie is because you can’t buy them at the grocery store. Also, they’re so fried you need to chase them with a six-pack.
“For me, it’s really not about the eating anymore,” he said. “it’s the thump! It’s when they hit a jig and you know you’ve got ‘em. It’s knowing that when you find one, you’ll find a whole mess of them.
“They live to eat, just like us,” he said as the other guy put another log on the fire. “Catching crappie is just like playing baseball. Once you learn how you can’t stop.”
I really didn’t have anything to add to a fishing conversation until I remembered that my business partner’s dad used to get her and her three brothers into the jonboat and head to the Roaring River tailwaters. It was her mom’s job to keep the kids still and warm in the early spring evening cold so that her dad could gig for fish and frogs and say, “Hush! You kids quiet down you’ll scare the fish. Shhhhh! Being cold is no reason to talk.”
“Yes,” the surprise visitor in the garage said, “just as your life is undergoing incomplete aggression, you should go fishing.”
He looked right at me for five unblinking seconds. “You know,” he monotoned while picking up a piece of bark to toss into the stove, “I probably shouldn’t say this, but will.”
I wondered if this would morph into a nervous moment and it did.
“The only reason I pick up the newspaper every week is to read your fishing column. That woman who writes it, I forget her name but I should find it out since I want to sell her a boat, a big wide one, she knows what she’s talking about. She knows a whole lot about fishing and she knows about the thump.
“I just can’t read all that other stuff about meetings and departed friends and what people who aren’t out fishing are doing with their time.”
He mentioned that he is finally of an age and weight that he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about anything.
“I’ve played music and written songs all my life, even while driving a truck for thirty years so I could feed my family. Then the other day, your friend and mine, told me the songs I write are too long. I told him I’m not writing songs to have them played on the damn radio, I’m writing them because it makes me feel good, Besides, does he think I like editorial cartoons? Always harping on politics? Talk about too long!
“Fishing is strong medicine. You gotta be hooked on something. Ohh, there’s a song there.”
It’s true, every hour of fishing adds an hour to the end of your life. At least that’s how fishermen tell it.
We just got a weather alert that on Wednesday, the weather really is planning to clobber us again. Right then he called and asked me to go fishing.
Soon. Soon.