Largemouth Bass

(I realize this is, in fact, a bluegill. Non-copyrighted, good photos of largemouth were difficult to find, so I went for the other Ashegon lake stand-by, the bluegill.)

For the past couple weeks I've been working on poems about my family. They're posted at the joint adventure in blogging in which Lauren and I have been engaged. I want my folks particularly to know how much I love them and that it's difficult not to be a bigger part of their daily lives. I am so often torn between my desire to be an independent adult and the knowledge that I am missing so much of the stuff that makes a family a family: broken hearts and weddings, births and funerals, Sunday dinners and Dad's softball games. I know Mom & Dad don't always understand the weird decisions I make about working in non-profit or getting degrees that don't seem very practical, but they've always supported me through my many and varied flip-outs.

I don't know how to tell them how much that means to me. The best I could do was write a couple poems and hope that they might understand. Early this week, I sent both of them copies of the poems. The one I wrote about Pa is about fishing at the cabin and how much I miss it.

A quick note about my parents and poetry. My mom once told me that her ideas about poetry and my poems were very different. This was, I think, her tactful way of telling me that she didn't like anything I wrote aside from the fact that I wrote it.

At anyrate, I sent the poems on to Mom & Pa. My father has recently acquired an email address and normally uses it to send me weird forwards. When I logged on to my email a day after I sent them, I received the following email from Pa.

Love the poem and look forward to doing that in real life. FYI They're largemouth bass and I'm too lazy to dig for worms anymore.

This is, without a doubt, one of the best compliments I've ever received on one of my poems. Pa reminded me that despite my desire to keep acquiring degrees, save the world, or spend all of my spare time trying to wrangle words into submissions, there's still a part of me that my family loves and understands without question.