Gone Fishing
Well, enjoy. And if you want to see the people who did (deservingly) win the contest, go to www.usaweekend.com. Their names and their stories should be around there somewhere. :)
Family picnics are an eternal source of bewilderment to me. I’m ashamed to say that I have never had much of a fondness for the picnics held about three times a year in the front lawn of my grandmother’s house. While most people look back on their family’s midsummer gatherings with a fondness brought on by the blur of nostalgia, to me the announcement of another family picnic is the dread of getting lost in a sea of strange faces. Half these people don’t know my name which is just as well because the names I do know I can never manage to match with faces. Most people smile wistfully at the memories of some male figure (Dad or Grandfather or Uncle) wearing his “Kiss the Cook” apron while he flips burgers at the grill, but I tend to cringe when I think about the burned hot dogs and hamburgers made by men whose only goal is to see how high they can get the fire before the womenfolk start getting nervous. The struggle to find a comfortable place to sit in the oppressive heat when my chair is usurped by an older family member and the need to cling to a quickly warming can of soda are constants. For most, family picnics are a chance to reminisce back on the days when all the adults in attendance were kids, thinking back on their great escapades as foolish little teenagers. In my family’s case, fluctating gas prices are the prevalent topic of conversation.
Today is a little different, though. I’ve been sitting at the picnic table and instead of the oppressive heat I’m so used to, there is an unseasonably cold wind sending goosebumps up and down my uncovered arms and legs. A cup of coffee has been slipped in front of me by my aunt. I’m not much of a coffee person and I’ve burned my mouth on it twice, but it’s warm and I’m not, so I sip at it anyway.
There are more unfamiliar faces in the crowd this year, I note as I shyly avoid eye contact with each and every one of them. My mother’s cousin Rose, a woman with dark hair and a keen sense of the corny whom I have only met once before at a similar summer event, is one of them. Her presence seems to generate the stories of the good old days that are usually missing from these gatherings. Apparently she had once been the one her cousins had looked to for, as Haley Mills might put it, “scathingly brilliant ideas.” Something she’d rather not remember, I realize as I watch her grow red at a story my uncle is telling.
“Anna! Hey Anna!” My little cousin Tobey’s voice stirs my hazy mind. My eyes slither lazily toward him as he rides by on his Power Wheels. “Watch this Anna! Are you watching, Anna? Watch!”
“I’m watching,” I reassure him. “Don’t go near the road,” I add as an afterthought.
“Henry!” Rose calls to her son as he trails behind my cousin on the much slower Power Wheels car. At eleven, he’s actually too big to fit in the thing and that may account for some of its sluggishness, but the coincidence of who got what car does not escape me.
“Yeah, Ma?” Henry calls back, his attention focused on Tobey’s back, which is quickly gaining distance.
“Please let your sister have a turn!” Sarah, Henry’s little half sister, trails behind both boys on foot. Her hands are in her pockets and her eyes are to the ground. I can’t tell if she’s concerned with getting her turn on the car or not. She looks up as her mother’s plead fades into the wind and catches my eye. I smile at her and she takes it as an invitation. She changes direction and heads toward me. She plops herself down next to me as though we have known each other all her life, though I have never met her before this day.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I say back.
Her eyes become quizzical.
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” I answer, knowing with the beginning of the school year around the corner why she is asking. I also know she is looking for reciprocation. “How old are you?” I ask back.
“Almost eight,” she replies, straightening herself proudly. Her smile becomes wider, revealing two large gaps where baby teeth are missing.
“Wow,” I say and mean it. Sarah is tall for her age. I knew she was young, but I never would have guessed she trailed behind her half brother by so many years.
We sit in silence for a moment, her legs kicking back and forth on the picnic table. Her eyes follow her brother and my cousin as they continue to race, her sitting down with me being taken as acceptance that she will never get a turn.
“Wanna know a secret?” she asks as they speed by us.
I hesitate momentarily. No one has ever really asked me this before considering I am reknowned for being a bad keeper of secrets. But then I realize that she is only seven years old and that seven year olds rarely have secrets worth remembering, much less remembering to keep. I nod.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she says. “You can’t tell anyone because it’s a secret and you’re not supposed to tell secrets. Promise you won’t tell. Not even Henry or my mom.”
This worries me, but I don’t let my worry show on my face.
“I promise,” I say.
She sighs and waits a moment before leaning in, cupping her hand around her mouth as she whispers in my ear.
“My daddy lives in the sky.”
My eyebrows raise instantly.
“He’s dead,” she adds.
I don’t really need the clarification. I can remember easily the sadness that overcame my family when Rose’s second husband, Patrick lost a long battle with cancer around June of the year before. Despite their absence at most family gatherings, the loss had sent a wave of shock through the family and a chill up and down our spines.
“Oh?” is the only thing I can find to say because her wide eyes don’t seem to be asking me for any kind of reassurance. Instead it really is like she is just telling me any other secret, almost as though she’s glad to be the one to pass the knowledge on to me.
“Yeah,” she says. “You know what he’s doing up there?”
“What?” I ask, genuinely curious.
“Fishing,” she says. “Catching fish. He likes to fish.”
“I see,” I say. Having only met Patrick once before, I know very little about him and so this is new information to me. The only thing I really knew about his talents firsthand was the one he had for the guitar. My only clear memory of him is when he played “Hotel California” for us at the picnic he came to with Rose less than a year before he would be gone. I still had the pick he borrowed from me to play.
“Yup,” she says. “That’s what people do in Heaven. They fish.”
Her eyes turn toward the sky and my own gaze follows hers. Even having heard the sky compared to a big blue sea before, fishing in Heaven was a new idea to me. I could almost imagine Patrick sitting on a cloud with a fishing pole, catching fish to show his daughter.
Unlike Sarah, who is half my age, I have never lost anyone important to me so I suppose the newness of the idea comes from never having had to wonder what it was those I cared so much about are doing with their time Up There. It seems like it is Sarah’s instinct that makes her so sure of what her father is doing in the hereafter. I wonder if I will ever be that instinctive when I do lose someone close to me.
She sits next to me for a while longer before moving on to the swing set. Even after she is gone, I continue to examine the great blue canvas above me. Sarah’s secret will never leave me.