Father's Day dawned for me at 7 a.m., when out of the fog of a deep sleep, I became aware of the lumbering steps of a herd of elephants coming up the stairs. As I pulled myself up closer to consciousness, I heard the unmistakable sounds of compressed air escaping. I recognized these sounds — the thundering, the shushhhhing — as the unmistakable sounds of my wife and two daughters trying to be quiet, and telling each other to be quiet, as they sneaked up the stairs to serve me breakfast in bed.
I did what any Dad would do — I threw myself back in bed and feigned sleep until they burst into the bedroom trumpeting the news.
It was all very sweet, as Father's Days are. They are, I've decided, particularly representative of family life — very dear, very sweet, all the more so, because things are comically off the mark. Case in point, what happened next.
After breakfast, we decided to do something that sounds like a typical Father's Day activity — fishing — only in our house, it's anything but typical. I don't fish. My Dad wasn't a hunter or a fisherman, so I never learned. My wife has done more fishing than I have, but it isn't something she does more than once every five years or so.
Still, because it was free, and it was Father's Day, and we were all together wondering what to do — and because my wife had run out and bought night crawlers earlier that day — we went.
Driving 20 minutes or so, we pulled off the road to find a place my wife calls Joe's Hole. It's a natural swimming hole in a stream in South Newfane near where her grandparents lived. It's a peaceful, beautiful spot — and, as it turned out, a pretty fair place to fish.
Hampered by our equipment — my 3-year-old Margot and I were sharing a yellow Snoopy fishing rod and reel, not something I've seen on Bassmasters — we set out, and I was aware that we were the bait for hordes of hungry mosquitoes.
Nonetheless, it was peaceful, and our girls were enjoying things. Then my wife Julie got serious. We had figured that if there were any fish within 20 miles of us, they would be in the deepest part of the fishing hole, at the bottom of a two-foot waterfall, some 15 yards away from us. I couldn't get there with my Snoopy rod, and Julie kept snagging her line in a nearby tree, so she decided to climb up the rocks to get above the waterfall and drop her line in. She took our 8-year-old girl Marielle with her.
And darned if Marielle didn't land a 6-inch rainbow trout almost immediately. Triumph! It was a great moment in the kid's life; her elation was obvious.
Then it all turned sour. The fish had swallowed the hook, and nothing we could do could save it. When she realized she had killed a fish in cold blood, Marielle burst into tears and suffered paroxysms of weeping that lasted 15 minutes.
We tried to console her that she hadn't done anything wrong, that the fish had simply swallowed the hook, that we would give the fish a decent burial .... Nothing worked. Marielle insisted she would never eat fish again — she hardly does now — and asked us to take her victim home and put it in our freezer.
As she calmed down, she placed the fish in a dignified way on a rock and named it "Prayer." It seemed like the storm had passed. In fact, it wasn't long before Marielle decided that "Prayer's" afterlife would be more companionable if she caught a friend for her fish.
So, back she went, up the rock, dropped her line in the water, and doggone it, if she didn't land another one, which also swallowed the hook, shuffled off the mortal coil, and induced more tears — although wasn't that the point, Marielle, to catch and kill another one?
This one, Marielle named "Honor" — a fitting name for a six-inch Brookie who died so nobly.
With tears in our eyes and bugbites on our skin, not to mention both fish on a stick bound for our freezer and someday, a dignified burial, we headed home. I wasn't too sure what had just happened or whether it was a good time, but it certainly was a rich experience, all the drama of life compressed into an hour and 15 minutes.
And it certainly was a fitting Father's Day, in a comically askew way that the best family celebrations are. I will certainly remember it, and I know there's a laugh coming my way in a few months, when I open our freezer, wonder what's in that bag and discover "Prayer" and "Honor" staring back at me with a look that seems to wonder what just happened.