Sometimes I go with him, but to me fishing is Boring with a capital B. I mean, you sit and wait for some random fish to take the bait, and then you yank it out of the water, take it home, fillet and eat it. What a lot of trouble when you can just open a can of tuna from the pantry anytime you want.
When I say this to Grandpa, he chuckles and says mój misiaczku, which as you probably know means my little bear in Polish. He tells me fishing is not about what you take from the water. It’s about what you give to the silence. Or something like that. It sounds better in Polish. Here’s the funny thing about Grandpa. When he talks in English, he sounds like Yoda. He really does. And with his bald head that only has, like, nine hairs sprouting from it, he kind of looks like Yoda.
So I try not to squirm too much when he takes me fishing. Mostly, I daydream the usual daydream (I’ve told you about this before) of moving to the city and being a famous writer, and one day I’m having a book signing and my fans are lined up out the door, like I’m Judy Blume or R.L. Stine. And that’s when I look up from signing books and there you are, Mom, looking just like you do in the pictures, and you smile and tell me how proud you are of me.
And I don’t even ask you where you’ve been all these years and why you went away, because it’s my daydream and I know there’s no good explanation or excuse, so the subject doesn’t even come up. We just go for a Cherry Coke or egg cream, and we go shoe shopping and everything is perfect.
When he’s fishing, Grandpa thinks about you, too, but not the way I do. He thinks about the past, when you used to be his daughter. He tells me how you loved fishing as much as he did and even when you grew up and had me, you would still go fishing with him.
He said you made your own sinkers at night in the kitchen, melting the solder—which has a low boiling point, which I know because we studied chemistry in school—over the stove and pouring it into the molds shaped like upside-down pyramids while the radio played.
And that’s when I start to remember, just a little. Okay, maybe it’s not an actual memory, maybe I just think I remember because Grandpa has told me the story so many times. I’m in the kitchen, sitting at the scrubbed pine table that smells like kitchen Lysol. And you’re standing at the stove and singing to the radio. I even know what song you’re singing because it’s the Jenny song. It really is: “867-5309/Jenny,” by Tommy Tutone.
Jenny is an okay name, I guess. Even though the guy singing the song got it off a bathroom wall.
But really, it’s kind of a happy, bouncy tune and I have a perfect memory of you with your hair held back in a butterfly clip, wearing one of Gram’s aprons, singing along while you make fishing sinkers.
At some point in the memory, Gram comes in and she scolds you for using her good gravy pan and now it’s contaminated and she’ll have to go out and get a new pan.
I remember your laugh and the sparkle in your eyes when you say, “Ma, I’ll buy you a hundred gravy pans! And a servant to make the gravy, and another to pour it on your potatoes. I’ll buy you anything you want!” And then you pick me up and we dance around the room with the Jenny song playing on the radio.
I think that might be my last memory of you. I don’t know how much of it is real and how much of it I made up. But I do know all the sinkers you made are still in the bottom of Grandpa’s tackle box. He never uses them. He uses shot pellets instead. He says the ones you made are too heavy and besides, he doesn’t want to lose them.
Like hanging on to something you made is going to bring you back.
Today Grandpa had a delivery to make to Camp Kioga. In the summer, they’re our best customer because they have like a few hundred kids at their summer camp. It was one of those blue-sky-perfect days, and I was glad to be out on deliveries with Grandpa instead of cooped up at the bakery. At the camp, he went inside and I was just sitting, listening to the radio, WKRW, which plays oldies. And you’ll never guess which song came on: “867-5309/Jenny.”
I took it as a sign.
It turned out to be a bad sign because three boys from the camp started stealing from the back of the truck. When I first saw them, I got confused. I mean, I’ve never been stolen from before. It felt really…icky. Like someone was doing something directly to me. I’m feeling icky just remembering.
I’m also very sorry to tell you that I got scared. I almost chickened out and slid down to the floor of the truck to hide until they stole everything they wanted and went away.
There, I admit it. I was scared. What a baby.
In social studies, I once wrote a report on Eleanor Roosevelt and she said a lot of famous quotes. One of them I memorized is this: “We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the
