Fishing Boy
13 Aug
“Let’s stop catching the fish,” I told Joey on Tuesday as he was throwing his cast net into the ocean at Cedar Key and scoring handfuls of baby fish, whose heads were getting stuck in the holes of the net. For the most part, the fish were surviving — Joey captured them, then he and Danny plucked them from the tangles and plunged them into a bucket of water — but we lost one, and that made me sad.
“Mom,” Joey said, “This is fishing. You catch fish, and some die. There are lots of fish in the world.”
Fair enough, I thought, and so I let Joey continue pulling in fish after fish. Then I saw the sign:
No Fishing or Swimming Allowed.
“Joey, I just noticed this sign,” I said, pointing. My almost third grader turned, read the words we both missed when we first arrived on the dock and said: “Uh-Oh, we better go.”
“Yep, we better.”
And we did.
And after a few minutes of admiring what he’d worked so hard for, Joey set his family of fish free into the waters of the West coast. And that made me feel so much better.
