July 21st Writing Practice: What I did the summer before my 9th grade year -- kissing girls and a fishing reverie

I kissed a freckled, brown-eyed, brown-haired Hawaiian/Mexican girl named Kathy. I kissed her every day, before she went off to do her paper route.

I discovered Tewinkle Park. It was a mound pushed up by bulldozers, with a never-running set of water slides, a path, and 3 golf-pond like "lakes." Robert Z, a full-blood Czech kid who looked like an all-American California boy and I fished there every day. I mean that -- barring some severe edict from the Parental Units, we were there every single day. We used jigs called Sassy Shad, which looked like little grey rubber fish with a paddle for a tail. When pulled through the water, it really looked like it was swimming.

Our favorite was night fishing. We'd sneak around the shallows, with unweighted plastic worms on our ultralight outfits (spinning gear that was almost as small as it could get, so even a small Bluegill would feel like a Marlin) and cast onto the shore, or a boulder next to where the behemoth bass (usually 12" or so) were sitting in the shallows, starting at the surface of the water. We'd pull the worm off whatever we cast onto, so it would make a natural, meaty Thunk! in the water -- bass would drool all across the lake. We'd stare at our line -- plenty of slack, so that when they picked it up, they'd have no un-natural resistance.

Two twitches, and the line would slowly head for deep water. Our hearts would beat out of control, and in a forced hushed whisper, we'd call to the other -- they'd reel in and run over -- stepping quietly so we wouldn't shake the water & scare the fish. The line would still be moving. We'd both be visualizing a huge bass swimming, green & dank, with a potbelly & enormous mouth, swimming with OUR worm in it's mouth. It was always OUR stuff -- we bought all of it together. I kept my stuff at his house because it was closer ot the park & my mom hated the idea of fishing.

We'd set the hook, and the jiggling rod would be all marlin again, and the bass would be strong and live at the end of the line, maybe (beyond all hoping) it would jump & splash the light from the baseball fields all over the little lake.

We'd pull in an exhausted little fish, and let it rest in the shallow water as we watched its gill plates breathe, and were amazed that we'd connected with this little wild thing.

Carefully, we'd lift it out of the water & get the hook out with a minimum of contact, so we wouldn't mess up the mucous layer on the fish that we both knew was protection against fungus & parasites. It was beyond shame to see a fish you "recognized" ("that's the one that lived under the pillars by the gazebo") floating and dead due to messy release or bad hook timing -- letting it swallow the hook.

We switched to fly-fishing, and kept fishing there well into high-school, even though it was a "kid" thing to do. All that started by seeing kids fishing with handlines & velveeta cheese between the slats of the little pier as we drove by.

[to be continued]