A Father's Love non-fiction

Dad's Shakespeare Model FN 

 The mist hangs over the  early morning mirrored waters of Lake Owen. A pair of loons whistle to each other as they work the shoreline. The stillness seems to extend farther than the pine forest that surrounds our gently rocking skiff. SCREECH rips through the silence like a scalded bobcat...like a truck engine deprived of oil and its piston bulldozing into the cylinder wall. The loon pair slips in silence beneath the lakes surface. Jumping from my seat at the boat's bow I prepare to dive to safety to join them. Then I hear the familiar click,click clack of my Dad's ancient Shakespeare reel as he reels in his line. Then another SCREECH rips through the air as Dad winds up for another cast, the nightcrawler flailing through the air trailing behind the half pound lead sinker rocketing  it to a noisy splashdown fifty feet off the port side bow. Ahhh...No imminent danger, other than from possible flying worm guts.

Thus is the memory dredged from the recesses of my mind as I gaze upon my Dad's old fishing rod now perched atop his roll-topped oak desk that now sits in my study. The faux pearl handle where his hand used to rest and the fuzzy dacron line spooled by his hand onto the old reel. The ancient rod and reel were a huge embarrassment to my pre-adolescent mind at the time and only now do I recognize the love present in this hands.

We were fishing on Lake Owen, just outside Cable Wisconsin. I am sure my Dad would have much preferred to be walking the green sunny fairway of a golf course, yet here he is sitting in a creaky john boat with his not quite snot-nosed anymore son. I'm sure my Mom had lit the fire under his butt to spend some of his meager vacation time doing something with me  that I enjoyed, so here he was in the boat with me. He was never much of a fisherman. He used to tell the story of how he once went on an ocean fishing charted with a bunch of his buddies in the Army air corps. Everyone around him on the deck were pulling up fish one after the other while his bait went unmolested. Feeling sorry for him, one of his friends re-baited his own hook and handed his pole over to Dad to use. They swapped places along the deck, even switch sides of the boat, all to no avail. Everyone else kept catching fish while my Dad's line remained slack. No, Dad was not much of a fisherman. Oh, he'd occasionally take me to his brothers house along the Fox River in Oswego Il. where we would occasionally catch a Carp or two and sometimes we would drive the twenty or so miles to Silver Springs State Park and pretend we were going to catch some bass, but for the most part he didn't share my enthusiasm for the sport. He did enjoy getting out in nature, looking at the birds and perhaps a deer or two. More than anything he liked spending time with me, seeing ME smile and revel in nature's melodies. Melodies to which both our souls could harmonize.

After that "embarrassing" morning on Lake Owen, we went to shore and quickly made a trip to a nearby tackle shop. There, I purchased for him, a brand new Zebco spin-cast fishing rod and reel with modern monofilament line. I currently have that screechless reel also perched on his roll-topped desk. Silent though it may be, it is his old Shakespeare that screams of my Dad's love for me the loudest. 

Thank-you Dad.