My Fish in a Bucket List: What I Absolutely, Positively Have to Do While I Still Can
Bucket lists were never my thing. But I never turned 70 before. At the end of this month, I will. And a single item has emerged as something I absolutely must do — or rather return to doing — before the final curtain: Go fishing.
In the role that won him his second best-actor Oscar in 1995, Tom Hanks, playing country boy Forrest Gump, tells everyone he meets, “My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” I can say the same thing about fishing.
I grew up as a country boy, too, and learned from fishing that you never know what might be lurking beneath the water’s surface. When you feel that electric tug on your rod and start cranking the handle of your reel, you never know if you’ll pull up a big, beautiful bluegill, a rainbow trout or a sleek Walleye pike. Or it could be a bullhead catfish with fins as sharp as razor blades, or a vicious snapping turtle, or a slimy, rything eel, an ugly relic of the Cretaceous Period a hundred million years ago. I want to feel that magic and mystery again.
But there’s another reason fishing has risen from the depths of my mind all the way up to the top after my being away from it for 30 years. Turning to another movie analogy, I think of the 1941 classic, Citizen Kane…
