Sometimes I surprise myself, less than pleasantly, with a random memory that bubbles up from wherever we store memories and hijacks my attention for a moment or so.
For no special reason, I remembered a moment as a small child when my father took me fishing from a pier in Highlands, New Jersey. My mom and dad used to rent a summer bungalow in the same colony as mom's mom and dad, Gramma and Grampy, when our family as I recall was just me and my sister, Evan.
My Dad worked almost all the time 'in the city' (New York City) and drove down to the shore on Fridays, in the era before the Garden State Parkway, made life simpler if not easier, and it used to take him hours to make the trip. He'd relax by fishing for most of the weekend or taking us to the beach at the end of the path that separated the two columns of bungalows.
He'd buy a small white cardboard container of bait, killies packed in crushed ice, that as the day wore on and the ice melted, the killies would come back to life from their frozen state but we still grabbed them by their wriggling bodies and hooked them through their mouths at the end of the fishing line.
My Dad did catch and release, though we did eat a lot of fish in our house, we bought it at the store rather than separate it from dancing at the end of a fishing line. I went one step further as I never caught a fish, not once and not ever. Possibly why to this day I have no enthusiasm or interest in the sport at all.
The memorial was in a restaurant in Highlands whose name momentarily slipped my mind as I was typing this, but I have it now, a place I remembered from when I was a literal wee slip of a lad spending summers that seemed to stretch on forever in a bungalow by the shore, not realizing at the time that this was indeed as good as it gets.
-bill kenny
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