Tag Archives: Captain D’s

Crappie

Crappie: (n) a sunfish of central U.S. rivers

 I am not an expert at fishing.

I do not know what qualifies one for being considered an expert, but I think it has something to do with the size of your tackle box. I understand worms, minnows, bread dough and a few other simple forms of bait. Yet I know people who have huge containers, with all sorts of different spinners, bobs and plugs.funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

I don’t know anything about those.

I was always the kind of person who went fishing because I was escaping from some task, some person or some event which was less than desirable. I discovered that once you established you were going fishing, then people usually left you alone to your hook, line and sinker.

But one of the things I did learn about fishing, since I was a Midwest boy, was that if you didn’t cast your line very deep into the pond or lake, a whole bunch of busy, hungry crappies would make their way to bite on your hook, and you would pull them in. They were about the size of the egg on a McMuffin. I realized I could have caught maybe a hundred of these little fellas—and one time I decided to bring back a batch.

When I presented them to my dad and older brothers and said I was going to clean them for dinner, they laughed at me. It was a mocking to scorn.

But once I got out in the garage and started working on them, I saw that when the crappies lost their fins, gills and scales, the crappies only produced enough meat to put on a Ritz cracker.

I cleaned twenty-five or thirty of them and didn’t get enough for me to eat.

So I guess the lesson of my story—if there is one—would be that if you like to catch fish, the crappie is your good friend. Not only are they willing, but downright sacrificial to the cause.

But if you want to eat fish, cast your line a whole lot deeper—or just go to Captain D’s.


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Amuck

dictionary with letter A

Amuck: (adj): out of control: the anarchists were running amuck.

Innocence is often what we scream when we’re notoriously guilty or foolishly ignorant.

To acquire innocence, one must find oneself in a profile free of guilt and not yet aware of ignorance. That doesn’t happen very often.

Sitting in front of a meal of fried fish from Captain D’s Seafood last night, I realized that the possibility of maintaining a low-caloric dinner depended on whether I was going to eat next to nothing of the portion provided, or push it away and rely totally on the sides that were lessened in calories.

Yet at the same time, how can you be a vivacious, energetic, creative and passionate human being and step away from a plate full of fried fish?

Perhaps if you are a nun or of a monastic order, gaining strength and pride through such fasting, you can maintain personal dignity while failing to devour.

But the true essence of the human experience is finding a way to eat the fried fish and enjoy it without running amuck and consuming too much–and then having it show up on the various areas of your circumference in the future.

How does one do that?

How does one find himself gregariously and voraciously involved in life without running amuck with overage and excesses?

It’s obvious that our poets and musicians have never been able to find such a balance, many ending up self-destructive or destitute.

Certainly ministers and schoolteachers tout that they have a regulatory system enabling them to be prudent, prim and proper–but even with them, occasionally when you pull back the holy cloth or move the blackboard, you see hidden vices and places where they have run amuck.

Is it too much to ask of a human being to be temperate?

Is it beyond the comprehension of our being–which mingles a little monkey with a little angel–to contend that we are going to do heavenly things?

Or do we need to have a side of deviled egg with our angel food cake?

 

 

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