Fishing

I am obsessed with walking around Piedmont Park at lunchtime. I get a whole hour lunch and I walk to Piedmont Park (huge city park) and explore midtown for the majority of that every day (doesn't seem like much, but after two years of a 30 minute lunch spent walking corporate office parking lots, this is really phenomenal) Honestly, all I have to do is talk the powers that be into raising my pay above poverty level and I think I'm cool with just continuing this job for a while.



Piedmont park is really fascinating to me--there's a pond there and this older man, every day, goes fishing just with a string and a hook. All these ducks and a solitary heron come and hang out with him every afternoon. He'll catch a fish, and if it's big enough, he'll put it in his bucket. If it's small--he tosses it to the heron, or to one of the ducks. Usually to the heron, though. On monday, I just sat and watched him for the whole hour. Whistling, tossing a fish in the bucket, tossing a fish to the heron. It was really cool.



I'm curious--does he actually eat the fish? I assume he does. Inner city fishing always kind of sketches me out. There is an awful lot of trash in any given pond, let alone chemicals and other toxins...

Every city I've lived in, though, I've seen tons of people fishing in the inner city streams and ponds. Kansas City, Detroit, Atlanta... People will survive wherever they are, with whatever they have. Either that or there are more hard core fishers than I realized.

I've never really enjoyed fishing. I remember going fishing with my grandpa and it was too cold in the morning, too hot in the afternoon, and millions of flies and mosquitoes bit me all day long. The fact that I was too squeamish to bait the hooks or remove the fish was a bit of a hindrance as well. Thank god I only caught one. Drinking beer--Milwaukee's Best, no less--and hearing Grandpa's stories were the only redeeming factors. I'm glad I went though.



Cheers Grandpa.