Apparently I made a metaphor Friday and didn’t even know it. In case you missed it, here it is:
Every time he dropped his line in the water – and I do mean every time – he pulled it out with a fish attached to the end. At one point, a fish jumped out of the water to get the worm hovering just above the surface. The fish were all too small to keep, so we practiced the catch-and-release method, although I ended the excursion with a serious craving for some good ol’ fried fish like my dad used to make. I tried to fry fish once. It didn’t go well. I don’t think I’ll try it again.
Anyway, he had so much fun fishing that a couple of weeks later, I bought him a life jacket and took him out to Union Grove Lake to try his luck again. We were there for ten minutes before he proclaimed to anyone who would listen (namely, me, as I was the only person within earshot) that he was bored and he wanted to go home and fishing at Aunt Sandy’s was way more fun. See, fishing at Aunt Sandy’s had spoiled him. Fishing at Aunt Sandy’s showed him what it’s supposed to be like, minus the ideal of actually getting to keep them. Fishing at Union Grove demonstrated the reality of fishing – endless hours spent staring at each other while fighting the temptation to reel your line in and cast it out again somewhere else because maybe the fish are biting “over there.”
Until the lovely Miss T. pointed it out in her comment, I didn’t even realize what I’d written. I had to go back and reread the whole post to find out what the heck she was talking about and as I did so, a wonderful thing happened: I discovered that in writing one thing, I’d actually written another. I thought I’d simply been recounting a fishing story, but it was much more than a simple fish tale.
Suddenly they all died. The end. 