A Return to Fishing(Phil Penne) I bought a fishing pole last week.

Now I realize this is not news similar in importance to the discovery of penicillin, but it’s a momentous occasion in my life, since I haven’t been fishing in better than twelve years.

The last time I participated in the ritualistic drowning of shrimp was with my boys. It was back in the days before Eminem and X-Boxes, back in those heady times when Dan Marino was still able to hurl a football that would thread the needle and land predictably in the waiting hands of a wide receiver.

Now make no mistake, I treasure those times spent with my sons. I miss watching the excitement that danced in their eyes as they hefted an eight-ounce speckled marine monster over the railing of the pier. I know that in my twilight years, as my memory fails and I saunter through the mall wearing my pants inside-out and carrying on conversations with invisible war buddies, I’ll still remember fondly those times that I would meticulously prepare fillets the size of playing cards and place them lovingly on the grill. When we sat down to dinner Mommy and I would rub our tummies and smile broadly as we relished each and every one of the four bites it took to devour those aquatic delicacies.

What I won’t particularly miss are the spilled bait buckets and rat’s nests in reels. I won’t miss the fishing lines crossed with the guy who, for lack of a bottle opener, bit the neck off his Miller bottle. I won’t miss the interminable barrage of questions like “Do you have any Band Aids that are bigger?”, “Wasn’t the tackle box here a second ago?” and “How come these shrimp taste funny?”

Fishing used to be a big part of my life. I made many life-altering discoveries whiling away the hours with a rod in my hand and a racing stripe of zinc oxide on my nose. It was on one such outing that I first discovered I was getting old. I remember it distinctly; I was leaning against the concrete railings of the Skyway Bridge, gazing out across the water and listening to the panicked cries of “Shark, shark” from tourists wearing sandals with Argyle socks, while watching the lobed-shaped fin of a dolphin cresting the water. I found myself thinking how nice it would be to be sitting in a comfortable lawn chair with a cushion right about now.

Damn.

That was one of the scarier moments in my life.

I truly believe fishing makes you a better person. It definitely makes you more patient; where else will you find people willing to wait forty-five minutes in anticipation of a three minute event, aside from Disney World?

Fishing also makes you more philosophical; you can fish for an entire day, get sunburned, send dozens of shrimp to meet their crustacean Maker, lose your Doc’s Goofy Jig, a MirrOLure, two Rappalas and your Swiss Army knife, shrug your shoulders and chalk it up to the wrong phase of the moon. You show me one other past time that can hold that degree of sway over someone’s psyche.

So, after an extended hiatus from the sport, I’ve gotten my gear together and plan on trying my luck this Saturday night. My car’s making a funny noise and will probably leave me stranded at some distant pier, I’ve had a premonition of running a treble hook through my thumb, we’re supposed to have foul weather that night, and the charts in newspaper say the tides should be all wrong.

Perfect. Fishing’s just as I remember it.

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