| Teach a Man to Fish | |
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Part 1 - Remembering Dad
by Tony "Stony3" Gustafson
Teach a Man to Fish, and You Feed Him Life
Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it
carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There
is magic in it.
~Herman Melville
Our father was something of a mystery. For my younger brother and myself, he was most familiar as a set of pre-dawn sounds: the rapid tap of a razor on the bathroom sink, the brief staccato of a spoon stirring coffee, and the heavy thud of hard-soled shoes treading the living room tile. On rare mornings we even heard the whoosh of the front door as it closed behind him, after which we’d drift back to slumber. Dad often didn’t return from work or school until late at night, well after we had gone to sleep and it wasn’t until I was 11, in a boat with my brother and the early-morning specter, that I learned what kind of man my father is.
He took us to a nameless lodge that hummed with the magic of possibility. The surrounding wilderness seemed to converge there, descending from all directions to bask in a flow of timeless glory and taste the chilled waters of Lac AuTrain. For a child reared on Cooper, Dumas, Lewis, and London, the lodge was a gateway to escapism unavailable in Chicago’s suburbs. By day I tracked Huron war parties and rogue traders with Hawkeye and Chingachgook, plied a willow rapier against the minions of Richelieu, and wandered side by side with Aslan through the mystical realms of Narnia. The wind was my sage, and it powered my imagination with whispered tales of wonder.
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