Waiting for More of Wadena's Fish Story

Wadena is lost somewhere on memory lane--deep in the woods. So, I'll stall.

When I was very young and a cute little girl didn't return my affections, I remember my mother saying, "There are plenty more fish in the sea."

Which made me feel better.....and was wise.

And I remember people saying of a guy with a girl friend, "Oh, he's really got her on a string."

Or sometimes I'd hear people say, "She's really got HIM hooked!"

I remember a girl I knew in Japan who used to constantly ask me, "You catch Jo-san?"

She was asking if I already had a girl friend or if I might be available. Such an honorable girl, she was. She worked in a bar, but she had way more integrity than a lot of allegedly higher-class women that I've met. But there it was--a fishing metaphor again......as if she assumed I was constantly trolling for women (which, at that point in my life, may have been at least somewhat true).

And, we continue to find ways to express ourselves in fishing talk. There is a contemporary vernacular that talks of "hooking up" with somebody (and these must be conservationists with barbless hooks, because it appears there's a lot of catch and release being practiced).

Romance, it seems, is often expressed in fishing language. Which is understandable, I guess, (we too often seem to be angling for trophies to improve our feelings about ourselves) and explains Wadena's use of a fishing tale to comment on human relationships. She seems to find humans to be quite pretentious and unrealistic about their relationships.

And she says that religion, low self-esteem and an unhealthy acquisitiveness are always lurking very near.....attached to us like dark shadows that take over and pull us into dangerous, even toxic places.

We tend to give up too much of ourselves in trade for what it is that we think that we want.

Me? I wonder if we'll ever get it right. So Ted Hughes was not so nice to Sylvia Plath. She killed herself. That makes him a bad guy? Maybe he was. So why did she marry him in the first place? Maybe that's the only truly valid question. Somehow, she failed to take care of herself. Why? Why do far too many of us become enmeshed with destroyers instead of taking care of ourselves?

Cats, on the other hand, always take care of themselves.

Cats know that you're the only one who will always be there for you........and that fishing is a profoundly uncertain business.