A Memory

At certain times of the year, I get this feeling like I'm forgetting to do something--like I have an appointment that I'm going to miss--fishing with my Father-in-Law. His name was Santos--I called him "sir", as in "Yes, sir." I had a great deal of respect for him. Santos died suddenly of a heart attack in 1999--one month before my son, his grandson, Ryan, was born.

A couple of weeks ago, my son was working out in the yard on a "project"--I had some spare lumber and he wanted to nail it together to form a makeshift workbench. I put my workbelt on him, handed him a hammer and a pair of safety glasses, and let him go to work. A couple of minutes later, when I went to check on him to make sure he wasn't using the hammer to dislodge bricks from the side of the house, I had a small shock.

I looked at him and saw Santos.

My father-in-law was a building contractor--a carpenter. Any time I want to picture him with a a hammer in his hand, I can easily conjure the image--pretty much any tool is interchangeable in my on-call vision. His thick-rimmed glasses and often-worn toolbelt were practically a uniform for him. That, and the carefree way he would hum while he worked, often old folk songs or church hymns.

After Fran and I were married, my father-in-law seemed to have two states of existence: either on a fishing trip or in the process of planning for a future fishing trip. On our excursions, he would really relax and enjoy things. We would stop on the way to the water and pick up candy bars, chips, and cokes--the only time that my father-in-law would leave his habit of eating very healthy.

I didn't grow up going fishing at the lake, so this was a fun, new experience for me--although there was a downside.

One time we were loading up the boat and I was handed a warm, foil-wrapped bundle of homemade tacos--I stashed it in one of the boat's handy compartments...When it came time for lunch, Fran's uncle was looking for the tacos and I told him where they were. He stared at me blankly as he opened the flooded livewell (where you keep fish when you catch them) to see the waterlogged tacos bobbing up and down. The uncle still has not forgiven me for that--I heard him bitching about it 10 years later--but Fran's dad laughed so hard I thought he was going to fall off the boat.

Another time, I was supposed to back up the family's RV with the trailer attached to it so her dad could get the boat out of the water. It's really easy, according to everyone who grew up doing it--just go "straight back!" Well, that's B.S., because I had that trailer flipping left and right and it took about twenty times of backing and coming back out to get it straight enough for him to get the boat on the trailer. By this time, I had draw a staring and head-scratching crowd of onlookers who couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. When it was time to move the mobile home forward and get the boat out of the water, I pressed the accelerator. Nothing. More, nothing. Finally, I punched it a little more, probably a little too much, and the boat shot out of the water, sliding halfway down the trailer as it came out. Fran's dad was furious, and laughing at me at the same time, shaking his head and asking "How did you grow up without learning this?"

He took me to a nearby lake to practice backing up the trailer, and determined that I could set the record for the worst ability to do it on earth. According to him, I am able to defy laws of physics and jackknife the trailer within 2 feet of backing...

About a month before he died, we sneaked off on a winter trip to a nearby lake. Santos had a great day of fishing--he caught more that day than he ever had on any of our trips before. I can still remember him smiling as he reeled in a 4-pound bass he caught off a plastic worm.

That was our last trip together--the greatest day we ever spent together.

I need to tell the story about our trip to the ocean in the bass boat where we got sucked out into the shipping lane and we ended up chasing a huge, half-dead fish across Galveston bay in the rain with his finger bleeding from a 4-inch gash and the boat filling with water, but I'll save that for another day.

I just can't shake that feeling sometimes that we still have an trip planned, and that I need to get my gear together.