For Father's Day - An Exerpt from BERNICE AND JOHM: FINALLY MEETING YOUR PARENTS WHO DIED A LONG TIME AGO

Among my father’s souvenirs from his Houma days were two tarpon scales that he kept in his fishing tackle box. Again I wonder, as in the case of the cameras, why this young man acquired a tackle box, but by the time I was old enough to understand fishing, he had one filled with all sorts of wondrous lures in addition to these tarpon scales. Among the photographs I salvaged from my parents’ house after they died are ones of men and a boat, not a large boat, but one large enough to have a small cabin. I think I went out on this boat once; I have a hazy image of being helped down a ladder into a dark space. I don’t know whether we actually went fishing, or even whether the boat moved after I was helped down the ladder. Nevertheless, either on this boat or some other, my father went fishing, caught a tarpon, and saved some scales. Or, perhaps, and just as likely, someone else caught the fish and he saved the scales.

Why might he have saved these scales? That is, what can we learn from a couple of strange items in someone’s tackle box? My guess is because the scales were so large that they challenged our very idea of a fish, at least for a person accustomed to inland bass as I was at the time. I want to believe that to him these scales were metaphorical reminders that our preconceived ideas—about fish, obviously, but actually about anything—could easily be overturned by observations if one allowed those observations to talk and listened to what they had to say. Again, it’s somewhat of a stretch, but those scales might well have been the equivalent of 3 x 5 cards with the words BE OPEN MINDED, NOT SURPRISED, printed in bold letters, a simple but important lesson about making your living by searching for naturally-occurring resources. At least those were my thoughts every time I saw them as a child, which was fairly often. Fifty, maybe sixty, years after discovering those tarpon scales in his tackle box, I still think the same way—suspicious of preconception, unusually respectful (some of my colleagues would say too much so) of plain observation—and wonder whether such a thought pattern is inherited, or was taught to me, by my father, and by example, beginning down in Houma with a couple of scales.

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