THE NARRATIVE ARC
My Old Man and the Sea
Nauseating fishing trip represents the things we do for love
My sister, her sons, and I are in Port Aransas with Dad. Mom has been gone a year, but I can still hear her warning me about the rip tide as she carefully arranges her seashell haul.
Wearing her tattered sunhat, I loll in an Adirondack chair. Body surfers, breaking waves and wind-whipped kites steal my attention from the book on my lap, All the Pretty Horses, which made Mom cry.
My dad and the boys tumble in, dripping, shedding sand, smelling of sweat and the sea, talking about tomorrow, a guided fishing trip on a chartered catamaran.
Dad: “Would you want to go?”
Do I want to rise pre-dawn, stuff my pockets with Dramamine pills and sunscreen sticks, board a boat with a dozen unfamiliar amateur anglers to bake and sweat while impaling small dead creatures on hooks in an attempt to lure larger living, often lovely, creatures into our arid homosapien hell?
“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s do it!”
Nature and love are fraught with danger and fish corpses and flies caught in bushes. And the rewards are worth every drop of sweat, blood…