On the way home from school Ethan-9yr says, “Mom. You should NEVER take the slime off a fish.”

Ethan-9yr often starts conversations like these. I adore them. It apparently has not occurred to him that I am not really big on random acts of fish de-sliming, and all the fish in the world are quite safe from me.  But I play along. ”Well. Okay, babe. Why shouldn’t I do that?”

“It’s the fish’s first line of defense. If you take the slime off a fish it will most likely get infected.”

“The fish? Or the slime? And  can slime be infected..? The only thing worse than fish slime is infected fish slime.”

“MOM! The fish. The fish will get sick if you do that, so just don’t.”

“Right. Do you really think I go around wiping off fish slime, Eth?”

“If you go fishing, I want you to have this information.”

I don’t tell him I haven’t really been fishing in years. Well, I have. But when I think of fishing, I think of when I was pretty young. Then, on Lake Whitney with our father, my sister and I would sit on the dock with our fishing rods with bright red and white bobbers, talking over all sorts of things while we swung our bare feet above the water. It never occurred to either one of us to de-slime a fish.  We were more concerned with getting splinters in our legs from the dock, or accidentally touching the bright green slimy algae that clung to the support posts below.

When one of us DID catch a fish, we were perfectly fine handing over the rod to Daddy to take care of. If we had to take an obligatory “look I caught a fish” picture, we didn’t really get too close to it then, either.

Ethan-9yr had more bits of wisdom regarding fish scales and their role in fish health. We discussed these things as well. I was warned against intentional or unintentional de-scaling of fish. (As if this is necessary.)

But I was already thinking back to the days on the dock or the simple thrill of speeding through dirty lakewater on an old blue boat. LaLa and I wore really unfortunate, ill-fitting orange life preservers and we tightly clung to each other just in case our dad took a turn too sharp and threw us overboard. He never did (and he’s a real nice guy), but it didn’t stop us from thinking this was a strong likelihood.   We combatted this possibility by holding on to each other, screaming, and singing songs we thought would endear us to God in our last terrifying, thrilling moments of life.  Anything with the words “God,” “Lord,” or “Jesus,”  that we could think of, we sang.  The words were swept away in the wind and we could barely hear them ourselves, even though we were yelling.

I didn’t give fish much thought then, even though we’d begged Daddy to ‘take us fishing!’  I remember thinking that my sister and I really got along quite well when we were at the lake. And that the sunlight shining on our ordinary brown hair somehow made it pretty and shiny. And that Daddy could make us scream by flicking green algae at us.

If the three of us went fishing again, it would be much the same. I wouldn’t touch the fish, much less de-slime or de-scale them. I’d love the sunlight on my hair and try not to get splinters while avoiding the algae my dad would definitely be flicking my way.

It’s a freezing cold day. I’d really rather be on a sun-drenched dock with my sister.