Celebrating Mary Lou

This year to celebrate the birthday of my half-sister's mother (my father's first wife; I'm still convinced that some language must have a one-word term for this), we have a two-person guest post!  My sister and my nephew each wrote something about Mary Lou.

-- >< -- >< -- >< -- >< --

On November 13, 1976, my mother became a first-time grandmother to my son, Joel, and my 4-year-old sister, Shanyn, became an aunt.  Shortly after Joel’s birth, my parents moved to Virginia and then to Florida.

In the summer of 1983 Shanyn started spending part of the summer with us in Pennsylvania.  A few years later, Joel started making the return trip with Shanyn and visited for a few weeks to a month in Florida.

It was great fun for Joel, but I was always worrying that they were getting into mischief at Grandma’s instigation!

Of course, as Joel got older the visits were not as frequent, but my mother would tell anyone who would listen how proud she was of Joel’s military service and that he had given her the new title of great-grandmother, with the births of his sons Zachary and Connor.

In observation of Mary Lou’s birthday on October 16, I asked Joel if he could write a Grandma memory.

===

I remember getting up at the wee hours of the morning to go fishing.  My grandmother, an insomniac, was already awake and vacuuming when the alarm went off.  There were several steps in the fishing process, first stopping so she could fill up her massive cup of Diet Rite cola at the convenience store.

Sand flea (Talitrus saltator) ,
by Arnold Paul / edit by Waugsberg
 - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.5

Instead of buying bait, we would catch it.  If we were fishing off of a pier then she had a cast net to grab some wayward mullet.  Mission complete, I thought, we had caught some fish!  If we were surf casting then she had a makeshift sand flea trap made from the remnants of an appropriated street sign and some chicken wire.  The trap went into the sand as the surf retreated to catch the little crustaceans.

Not long after the sun came up we would be headed back to the house.  There were always porpoises breaching in the intercoastal along the causeway.  Grandma James would look at the red and white smoke stacks of the power plants as her daily vision check.

I wasn’t much for the fishy part, but I enjoyed the time with my grandmother, who never met a stranger.  Oh, the stories!

— Joel Kent III

===

Mary Lou (Bowen) Sellers James would have been 86 today.

Fishing with My Father

Today is not only Father's Day, it's also National Go Fishing Day.  I figured I could cover them both by writing about fishing with my father.  Brilliant, right?

Daddy used to like to fish for bass, but I wasn't that crazy about eating bass.  I liked fishing for catfish.  There's something about catfish and the steaklike texture of the fillets that I just love.

Since we were freshwater fishing in Florida, we would catch mud cats, apparently more properly known as flathead catfish.  They're scavengers that live on the bottom of creeks and rivers, ergo the mud in their nickname.  I don't remember what we used for bait, but the Wikipedia page about them says live bait is preferred, so it may have been small fish or possibly worms.

One of the interesting things about catfish is their skin.  They don't have scales.  Instead their skin is kind of like leather.  Like scales, you don't eat it.  Unlike scaling a regular fish, however, it's necessary to peel off their skin.

That was something I always left to my father.  I had a great time going out fishing with him, and I was always happy when we caught catfish.  But he was in charge of skinning them.

The way he did it was to nail the catfish's head to the porch and then, wearing heavy gloves, use pliers to peel the skin off the body.  I freely admit it was not something that I wanted to do.

Then we would have yummy catfish fillets for dinner.  I think my mother lightly fried them.  They were always delicious.

Another fun thing about catfish is that I was always told that their spines are poisonous.  I don't think it's supposed to be enough to actually kill you, unless maybe you're just a little kid, but I guess enough to make you sick.

One time when we had catfish for dinner, my brother was put in charge of taking the trash out afterward.  The spines and nasty bits of the catfish were on the bottom of the trash bag.  He took the bag out, dumped it upside down, and mashed it down so that the trash can lid would close — and stuck himself with a catfish spine.

He ran into the house screaming, blood spurting out of his hand.  My mother, who didn't deal well with blood in general and especially not her children's blood, became hysterical.  I had to tell my sister to get her out of the room because she was just freaking out.  I got my brother to sit down and I bled out the wound as best I could.  And now that I think of it, I don't remember my father being there.  Hmm, where was he?

I also don't remember if my brother went to the doctor the next day or did anything to follow up, but he didn't get sick, so I guess I did a decent job (or maybe the spines aren't actually poisonous after all).  He developed a small lump in his palm where the spine had stabbed him, and years later he finally had to have it removed.

photo by Bébéranol

Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Catching Shellfish — Yum!

It's June 18, which means it's National Go Fishing Day!  What?  You say you've never heard of National Go Fishing Day?  Hey, I hadn't until two years ago, but since I have fishing stories to tell, I latched on to it quite quickly.

So far I've posted twice for National Go Fishing Day, both times with stories about fishing with my father.  I didn't really fish with him for shellfish, though.  He might have been the one to teach us three kids (my brother, my sister, and me) the basics, but it might have been one of our neighbors in Villa Tasso, the tiny unincorporated settlement where we used to live.  They probably had more experience with this type of fishing.

We were within really easy walking distance of the beach at the bayou (which was an arm of Choctawhatchee Bay), so it didn't take long to get to the water.  The shellfish readily available to us were crabs, shrimp, clams, and oysters.

Crabs used to hang out on the supports of the small dock.  Those we caught with long-handled nets, scooping them up from underneath.  They likely were blue crabs, like that guy above.

We used handheld nets to go seining for shrimp.  There would be two of us, each holding one end of the net, and we walked slowly through the water and netted the shrimp.  The shrimp weren't very big, but we caught a fair number of them this way.

I can't remember what we stored the crabs and shrimp in.  It was probably a cooler or something similar.

Clams and oysters we found by walking through the heavy wet sand beneath the water but near the edge of the beach.  We pushed down with our toes and felt for shells, then reached down and pulled them out, loading them into buckets.

After we had caught what we thought was enough, or gotten tired or bored enough, we would bring everything back to the house and announce to our mother that we had caught dinner.  At that point we left it to her to clean everything.  We just delivered it.  I guess that was kind of lame of us, but I don't remember her complaining.  I think she was happier with cleaning than with going down to the beach to catch it all!

There are many things I don't miss about Florida — 95/95 weather, entrenched mindsets about non-WASPs and about a woman's proper place in the world — but I definitely miss being able to catch our own shellfish for free and eat it the same day.

Photo:  Animals of Core Banks, North Carolina:Atlantic Blue Crab (Callinectes sapidus) caught at the Long Point Dock.  Attribution: Jarek Tuszyński / CC-BY-SA-3.0.  This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Catching an Ancient Fish

June 18 is celebrated in the United States (well, by some people, anyway) as National Go Fishing Day, which I first wrote about last year as a way of commemorating my father, who had passed away only one month before.  I went fishing with him quite a bit, so I have several more stories I can share.

This year I decided to write about the most unusual fish my father ever caught:  a gar.  Before he caught one, we had never heard of it.  This was probably around 1976 or so.  At that time there was no ubiquitous Internet of things with information easily accessible at the touch of a keypad, so I don't know how he figured out that's what it was.

Somehow he did figure it out, and he made a point of telling us kids that gar were really ancient, as  in back to the time of the dinosaurs.  We had the impression that they hadn't changed very much over all those millennia.

The main thing I remember about it is that it was really, really big.  It was certainly the largest fish I had seen my father catch.  I looked up gar on Wikipedia to try to figure out which species it was.  Based on the descriptions and the locations of their habitats, my best guess is a longnose gar.  The next possibility is the spotted gar, but I don't remember it having spots, just being big and long and green.

I know that Daddy had trouble getting the fish out of the water and to the house, because it was so big.  I don't recall the details of how he finally managed to do that.  I only vaguely remember something about it being lined up next to a dock while they figured out what they were going to do.

As it was such an apparently unusual fish for people to catch, we had a big party when we ate it, so everyone could share the experience.  I don't remember how the fish tasted, but I do recall that my mother tried making a wine sauce to go with it, and that the sauce really didn't work out well.  It wasn't one of her absolutely inedible disasters, but it did not rank among her best dishes either.

"Longnose gar (Lepisosteus osseus) at the New England Aquarium, Boston MA"*

Credit: Steven G. Johnson / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

Fishing with My Father

Today is National Go Fishing Day, which apparently is recognized every year on June 18.  I only read about it a few months ago and put it on my calendar to write about.  Coming only two days after Father's Day this year, it became more appropriate as a topic with the recent passing of my father, as he is the person with whom I primarily fished.

All of my fishing was in Florida.  We caught fish to take home for meals, fishing from the beach, a dock, or a small boat.  The very first time I went fishing, we stayed on the beach and cast out into Choctawhatchee Bay.  It took a little while for something to take my bait.  When it did, it fought pretty hard, and I had to work to get it to shore.  When I finally landed it, I was really excited and started walking toward it.

Suddenly my father yelled out, "Don't touch it!"  I turned to him to ask what was wrong and then looked back toward my catch — which was now gone!  It had bitten through the line and taken it back into the water with itself.

And that's when my father told me that what I had caught for my very first fish was a moray eel.  So much for eating that for dinner!

Since I barely got to see the eel before it retreated back into the bay, I don't know what type of moray it was.  There seem to be at least three that are found in the Gulf of Mexico off the northwest coast of Florida — blacktail, chain, and reticulate.  I found this photo of a reticulate moray which was caught in the Gulf of Mexico.  Maybe that's the type I landed that day.

"Juvenile reticulate moray (Muraena retifera). Gulf of Mexico."*

*Fish4333.  Credit:  SEFSC Pascagoula Laboratory, Collection of Brandi Noble, NOAA/NMFS/SEFSC.  Used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.  Image available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/noaaphotolib/5187500247.