When You Were a Boy

by Edwin L. Sabin

After seemingly an age, but with his mouth full and with other tokens of haste, Hen emerged from the side door.

“Bridget promised to call me and she forgot to wake up,” he explained.

Had Hen your mother, he would have been better cared for. But, then, households differ.

At last you were off, your jacket, necessary as a portable depository, balanced with lunch, and the can of worms snugly fitted into a pocket, over the hard-boiled eggs; your mighty pole, become through many pilgrimages a veteran, sweeping the horizon; and your gallant old straw, ragged of contour and prickly with broken ends, courting, like some jaunty, out-at-the-elbow, swash-buckler cavalier, every passing breeze.

As you and Hen hurried along, how you chattered, the pair of you, with many a brag and “I bet you” and bit of exciting hearsay! How big you were with expectations!

“By jinks! I pity the fish to-day!” bantered “Uncle” Jerry Thorne, hoe in hand in his garden patch, stiffly straightening to watch you as you pattered by.

You did not answer. Onward stretched your way. Moments were precious. Who could tell what might be happening ahead at the fishing-place? Busier cackled the town hens, into view rolled the town’s sun, from town chimneys here and there idly floated breakfast smoke. The town was entering upon another day, but you—ah, you were destined afar and you must not stay.

To transport your pole, at times inclined to be unruly, with its line ever reaching out at mischievous foliage and its hook ever leaving butt or cork and angling for clothing, was an engineering feat demanding no slight ingenuity. The board walk, which later would be baking hot, so that the tender soles of barefooted little girls would curl and shrink and seek the grass, was gratefully cool, blotched as it was with dampness from the dripping trees. When the walk ceased, the road lay moist and velvety, the path was wet and cold, the fringing bushes spattered you with diamonds, and the lush turf, oozing between your toes, gave to your eager tread.

Rioted thrush and woodpecker and all their feathered cousins; higher into the silver-blue sky climbed the sun, donning anon his golden robes of state; one last impatient halt, to extract your hook from your coat collar, and now, your happy legs plashed knee over with dew and clinging dust, you had reached your goal.

You and Hen were not the first of the day’s fishermen. As the vista of bank and water unfolded before your roving eyes you descried a rival already engaged. By his torn and sagging brim, by his well-worn shirt, by his scarred and faded overalls, draggling about his ankles and dependent upon one heroic strap, you recognized a familiar. It was Snoopie—Snoopie Mitchell, who always was fishing, because he never had to ask anybody’s permission.