Fishing

Aside from the social side of things, I’ve got every aspect of my life figured and sewn up. I suppose that’s kind of like saying I’m really good at tennis, only my backhand and forehand need work and I don’t know how to serve. And maybe that’s true. I don’t really know what I’m doing. But instead of tennis, I think life is more like fishing. At least, that’s how I try to approach it. For me patience is pretty much the most important thing.

I’ve got one hobby to keep me in shape, one hobby to be creative (you’re looking at it), and a third hobby to make me money. I do a little of each every day and that’s my equation. That’s what I mean when I say I’ve got my life figured. I feel lucky.

The part where I’m unlucky is about getting along with people. I haven’t cracked that chestnut as wide open as I would’ve liked. But still, it’s not a race and I feel I’m making progress. Little by little, I make better connections. I’m on track to find someone—a person or a crowd—I understand and get along with. In fact, I’ve got a newfound optimism which is, in large part, due to the dream I had last night.

Last night I dreamt I was fishing. I’d never bring it up except for the fact that, normally, I forget all my dreams. I know we all have them regardless, generally four to six times per night, but mine never survive long enough to see the light of day. I wake up each morning with a blank slate, feeling like a reanimated cadaver. At least until coffee is brewed.

But last night was different. When I woke the scenes felt like actual memories. The details were intricate and felt sewn into the fabric of my life with yarn from my own personal yarn supply. (I guess that’s how people usually feel about their dreams.)

The dream started when a woman with a dog on a leash asked me what kind of fish I was fishing for. Not realizing I was fishing until just that moment, I looked down to find a reel attached to a long rod with the butt end in my hands. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fished.

The woman had stopped, backed up a couple paces and asked, “What kind of fish are you hoping to catch?”

A few strands of long black hair were loose down over her ear. Olive-tinted skin and a Romanesque nose made me think she might be a model from Italy or someplace. I told her I was hoping for weakfish because it was the first fish that came to mind. Once, when fishing with my father as a boy, I had caught a weakfish. It’d been longer than my forearm and a struggle to reel in.

“Have you had any bites?” she asked.

I didn’t know. I felt I didn’t know much. My red and white bobber floated in the blue-gray water and we stood at the end of a long pier stretched out over the surf. I’m guessing we were somewhere along the Atlantic Ocean but, being a dream, the water could’ve been any ocean, any sea. The Dead Sea or the Adriatic perhaps.

“Bites? It’s hard to say,” I said. “I haven’t felt much of anything yet.”

The woman offered a wide smile, like she’d remembered an inside joke. “That’s the trouble, isn’t it? One never knows if the thing you’re fishing for is really interested or not.”

“It’s true,” I said. “You don’t have a clue right up until the moment one hits, or if your line starts moving out.”

“It’s the same thing with dating,” she said. “Sometimes I wish there were more obvious signals. Like instead of eye contact, there’d be ultrasonic tones.”

I stared out into the fog past my bobber. Wind blew the fog like white bed sheets hanging out to dry.

“Do you mean like the dog training device?” I asked.

She glanced down at the dog sitting patiently by her feet and said, “Yes. Exactly like the dog training device. That’s how dating should be. There’d be no mistaking the signal. The high-pitched tone will be strong enough to wake you from a nap.”

It sounded good to me. A real improvement.

Her smile was crooked but still perfect, with what I felt was the uplifting sense of a bright future locked inside. She seemed a genuinely happy person, or at least, she wasn’t one to spend a lot of time staring into the abyss.

We went on kidding in a friendly way. The sky was overcast and looked as though it might rain but no sense of urgency pervaded. Perhaps standing by such a large body of water had put it in our minds that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in life if our clothes got a little damp. I for one hoped it’d rain, got her hair wet. Long, wet, black hair, twisted like rope, was something of a fetish of mine.

After ten minutes, or maybe two hours, (it’s difficult to say when you’re riding a REM cycle) I realized the woman was someone from my past. It was one of those weird twists that occur in dreams. She was a stranger at first, but now she was someone I’d been in school with. Not only that but we had even “gone out” for a couple weeks in the 7th grade. Her name was Amy.

I held her hand as I walked her to her bus at the end of the school day. That was the gentlemanly thing a lot of my friends were doing. The bus was just out front in the parking lot but the walk felt long. We talked a little on the phone at night—hardly at all in person—and we held hands and walked to her bus together for two weeks. That was the extent of it.

When she dumped me, I was mostly relieved because I didn’t know what more to do. She wanted me to kiss her but I didn’t know how. Should I give her flowers, recite poetry? I couldn’t imagine a single move to make. Even after seeing her in the halls making out with her new boyfriend, Ben Ackerson, I didn’t feel jilted. I just felt relief. Only now, in the dream, did I feel a little sorry.

“Say,” began this grown-up version of Amy, the one standing beside me on the pier, “what’s your name?”

My lungs inflated and I held my breath. I was sure she was going to follow up with, ‘Didn’t we go out for two weeks in 1991?’ I waited but that follow up question never came. I exhaled.

And I wanted her to know my name—my full name including the middle initial, how it appeared on the stories I publish—but my memory failed me. Not a single letter came to mind. It was strange. How could I remember Ben Ackerson’s name and not my own? Looking away from Amy’s face for the first time in a long while, I muttered something about how names really weren’t important. She let it go but adopted a dubious smirk.

“What kind of dog is it?” I asked, to change the subject.

“Oh, I don’t know. Bo is some type of mutt. He was digging a hole out behind my house and I just decided to put a collar on him and take him home. I figured it’d be one less wild dog wandering the neighborhood.”

A pack of wild dogs ran through an alley in my mind. Working together it seemed a pack of dogs could do a lot of damage—dig holes under fences, terrorize the neighborhood cats, make off with packages left on doorsteps.

“That was very sensible,” I said.

“I think so,” she replied, fixing the strand of loose hair behind her unpierced left ear.

“Do you mind if I pet him?”

I leaned my pole against the railing and knelt down to pat the dog’s orangish fur. His tongue hung out and he felt warm like Amy’s hand in 1991. I wondered if—after all these years—her hand was still that warm. I assumed Amy and I were both forty-two or forty-three now, but it was the same as with the name of the ocean—there was no way to be sure.

Peering down at me as I knelt beside her dog, Amy appeared on the verge of remembering me but she never said so. I don’t think she was playing it cool either. Her open face and calm expression told me she had no idea who I was. I was just some type of mutt, I thought. She didn’t care who I was or where I’d come from.

Just then, as if being piped in from a cloud on a wireless signal, an old jazz tune started to play. I recognized the song immediately as “Gone Fishin’,” performed by Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong in 1951. The two artists sang to each other in an easy, playful back and forth and took turns throughout the song. In the verse that was playing, Bing sang with his velvety voice and Louis only chimed in parenthetically.

Gone fishin’ by a shady wady pool (shangri-la, really la!)
I’m wishin’ I could be that kind of fool (shall I twist your arm?)
I’d say “no more work for mine” (welcome to the club)
On my door I’d hang a sign, “gone fishin’”
Instead of just a-wishin’

“Do you hear that?” I asked Amy.

“Of course.”

“Do you like jazz music?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

Amy moved her hips back and forth in her navy trousers—hips much wider than those of 1991.

Gone fishin’
There’s a sign upon your door

One time I read the lyrics of the song on the back of a record sleeve in a Goodwill store. There were dozens of cardboard boxes overflowing with hundreds of albums—any two for a dollar. The price was right but no one else gave them a second glance. I was the only one shuffling through, reading the titles.

In something of a low spot, I decided the lyrics were about closing business down for good—becoming worm food. I dismissed the thought now because it seemed too dark for the fifties, too morbid for the breezy tune. I nearly bought the record—that and an album of Christmas songs—but the record sleeve was empty. I didn’t have a record player anyway.

Amy kept swaying side to side and a bright light within her features shined. She had some unique quality, some strange glow, I thought, that would put me on the right path. Standing on the end of the long pier, dancing and smiling, she made me realize where I was and pointed out my path.

“I hope you catch something soon,” she said, “while I’m watching. That’d be good fun. What kind of bait are you using?”

“I don’t know. Maybe squid.”

Then, because I could think of nothing else, I said, “How’s Ben Ackerson?”

“Ben Ackerson?”

“Doesn’t the name Ben Ackerson mean anything to you?”

She furrowed her dark eyebrows a second and said, “Not at all. I’ve never heard of him. Is he famous or something?”

I was sure about the name, and I was sure I’d seen them making out in the hallway in front of her locker half a dozen times at least. Had she truly forgotten all about middle school? If so, she must have a full life, I thought.

Her dog, Bo, dropped a steaming pile right then and Amy pulled a small green plastic bag from her pocket to pick it up. I glanced away.

Far out past my bobber, through the windblown fog, a small island appeared. On the island stood two empty lawn chairs. They were the type of cheap, collapsible chairs with checkered webbing that only last a few seasons. Flat and otherwise consisting of nothing but sand, the island looked an inviting place with only those empty chairs.

I turned back to Amy to point the island out to her, but she was gone. So was her dog. The jazz tune stopped and the whole scene disappeared.

Next thing I knew, I was walking home. The fishing pole gone, I carried only a small black tacklebox, like the kind my dad gave me for my birthday one year. The gift came just as I lost interest in fishing and I never filled it with hooks or lures or bobbers. The box just gathered dust out in the garage.

Soon I was lost at an intersection I didn’t recognize, and that part of the dream felt real too because I’m always getting lost. Even in my own neighborhood I get turned around, confused. A few dogs trotted across the street, single file and equidistant, like long distance runners.

There was another scene change and I was suddenly on my front porch, standing on my blue welcome mat. Slipping my key into the door, I thought about Amy. I worried I wouldn’t recognize her if I ran into her again. What if I walked right by and missed out? The angle of her nose, the shape of her mouth, her olive skin, they might slip from my mind in another thirty years. The door swung open and the dream ended.

I woke in my single bed with a clear picture of all that happened. It felt real. The fur of the dog, Amy’s smile, her gyrating hips. I really smelled the salt air and tasted it on my tongue. Even the notes and lyrics of the song, which I hadn’t heard for years, were now fresh in my mind.

Gone fishin’
There’s a sign upon your door
Gone fishin’
You ain’t working anymore

I’ve been listening to tracks like “Gone Fishin’” all day. Songs by Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Bobby Darin and singers like that. Singers from before my time who’ll be around long after I’m gone. It’s making we want to buy a record player—giving me nostalgia for a time I never knew in the first place.

Seeing Amy at the end of that pier, swaying her hips and shining from inside, that was a sign. Of that I’m certain. Dream or not, she’s a beacon etched in my mind. I could’ve dreamed of my dad or mom, or some old friend or college professor, but I didn’t. And I could’ve just as easily not remembered the dream, like usual, but I recalled it vividly.

I’m not exactly sure why the dream strikes me as hopeful. I hadn’t thought about Amy for years, so it’s not really about her. I don’t know. Maybe it was the song, or the dog, or those two lawn chairs out on that island. Maybe it was the calm, rolling ocean or the fog blowing past. Whatever it was, I’ve got this feeling of preparedness now, like I’m ready to stand out on a pier and wait and wait and wait for a real long time.

Exactly what it is that I’m waiting for, well, I’m sure I’ll know it when it hits, or when my line starts moving out.