Nevertheless, Robert and Uncle Joe and I did manage to land a fish, the kind veteran anglers call a “bluegill.” It was three to four ounces of well-contained fury, and it fought like a frozen bagel. Many times at airport newsstands I have examined sportsperson-oriented magazines with names like Tackle ‘n’ Bait, and I have noted that the covers often feature pictures of bold sportspersons struggling to land extremely muscular, violent-looking fish the size of guest bathrooms, whose expressions say: “Yes, you had better kill me, Mr. Sportsperson, because otherwise I will evolve legs and lungs and talons and fangs and come to your suburban home and wreck your riding mower and have my way with your women hahahahahaha.”
But the fish we caught was a cute fish, a fish that would star in a Walt Disney animated cartoon feature called Billy Bluegill Learns the True Meaning of Christmas. Robert looked at it, then he looked at Uncle Joe and me with a look of great upsettedness in his two-year-old eyes and we realized, being responsible grown-ups, that it was time to lie.
“The fish doesn’t feel it!” we announced brightly, almost in unison. “You see this sharp barbed metal hook going right through his lip?! It doesn’t hurt a bit! Ha ha!!” Meanwhile Billy the Bluegill was of course edging out the worm for the Academy Award for Best Performance by a Cold-Blooded Animal Gasping and Writhing Around to Indicate Extreme pain. And so Uncle Joe, being an attorney, got Billy off the hook (get it?) and we put him (Billy) back into the pond.
After that Robert and I didn’t go fishing for several years, until last Christmas, when we went up to New York and Uncle Phil—who is not our attorney but Robert affectionately calls him “uncle” anyway because he is my brother—bought Robert another fishing rod, meaning I had to teach him again. Fortunately, there were no worms available, as they had all formed up into characteristic V-shaped patterns and attempted to migrate South, getting as far as the toll booths on the New jersey Turnpike.
So Robert and I used “lures,” which are these comical devices that veteran anglers instinctively buy from catalogs. You would think that, to be effective, lures would have to look like creatures that a fish might actually eat, but, in fact, they look like what you would expect to see crawling around on the Planet Zork during periods of intense radioactivity. For example, many lures have propellers, which you rarely see in the Animal Kingdom. In my opinion, the way lures actually work is that the fish see one go by, and they get to laughing so hard and thrashing around that occasionally one of them snags itself on the hook. Back in the Prepuberty Era I used to spend hundreds of hours lure-fishing with my friend Tom Parker and his faithful dog Rip, and the only distinct memory I have of us catching anything besides giant submerged logs was the time Tom was using a lure called a Lazy Ike and it was attacked with stunning ferocity by his faithful dog Rip, resulting in a very depressing situation, vetterinarianwise.
So, fortunately Robert and I didn’t catch anything the second time I taught him to fish, and I think he’s now old enough to remember it clearly and thus never ask me to teach him again. That’s the good news. The bad news is, I am sure that one of these days he’s going to want to have a “Catch.”
Earning A Collie Degree
We have a new dog, which means we’re going through this phase where we spend a lot of time crouching and stroking and going “Yessss! That’s a GOOD girl!” and otherwise practically awarding a Nobel Prize to her for achievements such as not pooping on the rug.
Her name is Earnest, which I realize is not a traditional girl’s name, but it describes her very well. Most dogs are earnest, which is why most people like them. You can say any fool thing to a dog, and the dog will give you this look that says, “My God, you’re RIGHT! I NEVER would have thought of that!” So we come to think of dogs as being understanding and loving and compassionate, and after a while we hardly even notice that they spend the bulk of their free time circling around with other dogs to see which one can sniff the other the most times in the crotch.
We are not sure yet whether Earnest has a working brain. You can’t tell, early on, with dogs. When we got our previous dog, Shawna, we thought she was smart as a whip, because she was a pure-bred German shepherd who had this extremely alert look. At first we took this to mean that she was absorbing every tiny detail of her environment with her keen senses and analyzing it with computerlike speed, but it turned out to be her way of expressing the concept: “What?”
Shawna would be sitting in our yard, looking very sharp, and a squirrel would scurry right past her, a squirrel whose presence was instantly detected by normal, neighborhood dogs hundreds of yards away, causing them to bark rigorously, and also by us humans, causing us to yell helpfully: “Look! Shawna! A squirrel!!” And after a few seconds of delay, during which her nervous system would send the message via parcel post from her ears to her brain that something was going on, Shawna would turn in the exact opposite direction from whichever way the squirrel was, adopt a pose of great canine readiness, and go: “What?”
The only dog I ever met that was dumber than Shawna belongs to my editor. This dog, a collie named Augie, also looks smart, if you grew up watching “Lassie.” Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with was made up of idiots. Remember? One of them was always getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the farmhouse to alert the other ones. She’d whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they’d always waste precious minutes saying things like: “Do you think something’s wrong? Do you think she wants us to follow her? What is it, girl?” as if this had never happened before, instead of every week. What with all the time these people spent pinned under the tractor, I don’t see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever. They probably got by on federal crop supports, which Lassie filed the applications for.
So anyway I thought Augie, being a collie, would have at least some intelligence, despite the fact that when my editor and I would walk into his house, Augie would not notice us, sometimes for upwards of a half hour. When she finally did notice us, talking and drinking beer, she would bark as though the Manson gang had just burst in, so my editor would have to go over and sort of say, “Look! It’s me! The person you have lived with for 10 years!” This would cause Augie’s lone functioning brain cell to gradually quiet down and go back to sleep.
But I still thought she was roughly on par with Shawna, IQ-wise, until the night—you may remember the night; it was the longest one we ever had—that I slept on my editor’s couch in his living room, which is also where Augie sleeps. Only she doesn’t sleep. What she does is, first, she lies down. Then she scratches herself. Then she engages in loud personal hygiene. Then she thinks, “Maybe I can go out!” and she walks across the floor, which is made of a special kind of very hard wood so that when a dog walks on it, it goes TICK TICK TICK TICK at exactly the volume you would use to get maximum benefit from the Chinese Ticking Torture. When Augie gets to the front door, which is of course closed—it is always closed at night; even the domestic insects have learned this by now—she bumps into it with her head—Then she backs up and bumps into it with her head a couple more times, in case there has been some mistake. Then she senses, somehow, that there is a person sleeping on the couch, and she has the most innovative idea she has ever thought of, which is: “Maybe he will let me out!” So she walks over to me and noses me in the face, using the same nose she uses for hygiene, and I say, “Dammit, Augie! Go to sleep!” So she lies down for one minute, which is how long it takes for her brain cell to forget everything that has ever happened to her since she was born. And then she starts again: SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH SLURP SLURP SLURP (think) TICK TICK TICK TICK BUMP (think) Bump (think) Bump (think) TICK TICK TICK NOSE “DAMMIT, AUGIE! GO TO SLEEP!” TICK TICK TICK TICK (pause) SCRATCH ...