Photo by Gary Walker-Jones on Unsplashremember, first and foremost, how beautiful you think we are; hold us up like love letters to your childhood. Trace your finger along the gill plate, flash him the feathery red gill inside; let him hear you praise our orange and blue speckles, our iridescence in the sun, our otherness. This morning, the pond is full of true sunfish: bluegills, pumpkinseeds and redbreasts. Pull up some dock, we're all here.
If you want him to fall in love with fishing, be more careful than your dad was. Keep your tacklebox latched. If he does reach into it, unable to resist its siren call, because hey everything looks like a toy—the skirted, neon-colored jigs, lures painted to resemble frogs—don't yell like your dad and startle him so that he jerks his hand back and drives the treble hooks on a tiger-striped lure into his finger.
If you want him to fall in love with fishing the way you did, spread out a week's worth of newspapers on the picnic table. Gently take his hand in yours and say, like this. Guide the cereal spoon he holds. Together, scrape the scales. Later, he will remember this moment, the movement of his hand in yours, as he strums the garage sale guitar you'll bring home. Let him fall in love with being taught, with the comfort of your attention.
We're not the smartest of fish; smart enough, they say. Our small brain-to-body ratio provides just enough functional intelligence to survive. Isn't that you too right now, surviving on the bare minimum, bereft, as if joy were bitten clean from your heart? One survivor to another, if you want him to love fishing, let this day be about forgetting for an hour or two. With her gone, let fishing become the glue, the thing you can always come back to if you drift apart like some fathers and sons do.
If you need him to love it, because right now you don't know what to say, so instead you fish, trust me: for today, don't show him the egg sac you'll pull from that bluegill like your father did with you. He will think: babies, moms. I share this, one survivor to another, because no one, not even a small-brained sunfish, wants your boy to be thinking of all he has lost.
