My 72-year-old dad thought I was taking him fishing like we had done when I was a kid.
He had no idea I had planned something special.
But the moment we arrived at the marina, the captain looked at my father, stared at his battered green fishing hat, and then quietly pulled me aside.
“He really doesn’t know?” he asked.
I smiled.
“No.”
The captain looked back at Dad.
“Wow.”
At first, I thought he was talking about the surprise I had planned.
I was wrong.
To understand why, you have to go back more than thirty years.
My dad is 72 now, and until recently, I thought one of his biggest regrets in life was that he had never been able to take me on a “real” fishing trip when I was a kid.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
We didn’t have much money growing up.
Other kids would come back from summer vacation talking about amusement parks, beach hotels, and family trips.
Our vacations were usually day trips.
Most of my clothes had belonged to somebody else’s kid before they belonged to me.
But I never thought of my childhood as unhappy.
A lot of that was because of Dad.
He worked maintenance at a manufacturing plant. Some mornings, he left before I was awake. Some nights, he didn’t get home until after dinner, with grease underneath his fingernails and so much stiffness in his back that he would lower himself into a chair like an old man, even though he wasn’t even forty yet.
Still, on certain Saturday mornings, Dad would wake me before sunrise.
“Get up.”
I’d roll over and bury my face in the pillow.
“Five more minutes.”
“Nope.”
“Dad…”
“The fish don’t sleep in.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they have jobs.”
That explanation made absolutely no sense.
But I was eight years old, so I believed him.
He’d pack peanut butter sandwiches, two cans of soda, and whatever chips happened to be cheapest that week.
Then we’d load his old fishing rods into our station wagon and drive about forty minutes to a lake.
There was a marina there, with actual fishing boats lined up along the docks.
We never used them.
Instead, Dad and I would walk past the marina, follow a dirt trail, and settle along the bank beneath two enormous oak trees.
That was our place.
He’d unfold two battered lawn chairs, hand me a fishing rod, and say, “All right. Let’s see if you’ve improved since last week.”
“I caught more than you last week.”
“You caught a branch.”
“It was heavy.”
“Strong branch.”
I loved those mornings.
I loved the cold air, the mist hovering over the water, and the way Dad treated breakfast like it followed completely different rules on fishing days.
Sometimes we’d eat sandwiches at seven in the morning because Dad said fishing had “different meal rules.”
