Fish Requiem
Maybe it’s advancing old age … or maybe I need more good books to read to fulfill my literary addiction … but I’m starting to notice the obituaries in the paper these days. Obits used to fall into the same category as high school sports scores, recipes in the food section and all the devotional stuff under the heading of feel-good clap-trap. Usually I won’t find friends or acquaintances there, but that will change, no doubt.
At this point I’m mostly pausing to look at the photographs of the recently departed, the one their spouse or children submitted. You can tell a lot from these, maybe more than we ought to know, way more than the verbiage about passing away peacefully or going to be with the Lord or being called Home, followed by a list of surviving family members that should be indispensable to genealogists many years hence. The saddest to me are the ones fished out of some old shoebox in the basement, obviously the only one they could locate, faded, out of focus, of a dearly departed no one thought enough of in life to bother photographing. There’s the shot of poor dead Mom with her daughter — obviously submitted by the now motherless child — which shows a better photo of the kid. Some have the family dog. Or the cat. I assume the pet may still be alive to carry on the memory.
But I’m mostly struck by how many of the men are shown with their fish. Big salmon, huge halibut, trophy trout. Bad shots mostly of the happy angler, probably shot at the pier by a half inebriated charter boat buddy. Dead fish, now both of em… Sometimes you still see an obit with a bloody elk or a fresh shot buck. Hunter fishermen: the last of an era, I suspect.
Maybe the only surviving mugshots are these photos. Maybe this was their one crowning achievement before departing to the heavenly Fish Pond. All I know is, I’m gathering up all my old fish fotos and burning them Now.
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