A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Fish Club Meeting
(as told by Tom S.*)

For the club meetings at Liberty High School, I always pick Pop up and give him a ride. This is the exact conversation from when Pop came to the car...of course both of them bump their heads getting into my van...

<Pop opens van door>
TOM: Hey Pop!
POP: Hey Goomba..<Bang> (Pop bangs head on van)
WALT: Ha ha, you weren't supposed to do that Joe.
TOM: Yea, ask him what he did when he got in?
POP: What did you do?
WALT: Banged my head!
All: Ha Ha Ha
POP: Hey, Joe Friedman's wife just called me, she wanted to..
WALT: <interrupting> She wanted to know if Joe had to go to a meeting tonight.
POP: What..no..See, I'm telling ya, you're just like my damn wife, I just about start to say something and you jump right in and interrupt me. Gracie does the same thing. Does Cheryl do that to you Tom?
TOM: Sometimes, but she says I do it to her.
POP: Oh, well, I know where you get it from! <pointing to Walt>

This was all before we were out of the driveway!!!

   * Names have been changed

Hey itsa me - Poppa Lamarca, hey, oh !

So I was out fishing at the creek the other day and I was throwin' a Thomas spinner around, ya know the 1/4 ounce one with the gold and silver blade, and I'm in the Willow hole, where Adolph usually sits, and throwin' in under the tree branch that hangs out over the water, where I caught that tagged trout about 8 years ago, and I'm getting a couple of follows, he's following it in but he's just not hitting it. So I change to the 1/8 ounce Thomas spinner, I was lucky cause I only had one left, I had got the other one I had caught on the bottom in the Trestle hole and I didn't have my waders to go in and get it - I mean no one was there so I could've put on the waders if I had brought them, but I forgot that I had taken them out of the truck when I had to go over to Fred's house and help him haul some furniture from his house, so I had taken them out, I can't remember anything anymore - anyway, he starts following this spinner in and I can see him swiping at it but he hit it too late and when I went to set the hook he was right near the bank and it pulled the spinner out of his mouth. I fell over from setting the hook and hit Tommy in the head with my pole, I don't know why he was standing behind me like that, except maybe since it was raining and he wasn't wearing raingear he wanted to stand under the tree, I said to him "Put on some raingear", then he said he didn't have any, and then I hear Walt coming over and he was carrying this hefty bag and he was saying to Tommy "Put this on", and he was saying that he had caught two in the Dead hole and lost one in the Third hole, and I said that I had a few hits here in the Willow hole and told him about using the 1/2 ounce and then changing to the 1/4 ounce Thomas spinner and that I had just missed him. Walt suggested using PowerBait, so I rigged up my pole for PowerBait the way Cam and Pete showed us up in Canada at Loughborough Lake and the day we caught all those bass with with that rig, then in the middle of catching all these bass, me and Walt switched places in the boat, Walt went to the back of the boat and I went to the front, Walt likes to sit in the back of the boat near his 18 tackle boxes, in fact I tripped over one of his tackle boxes on the way to the front of the boat and I said to him "Why don't you put some of those tackle boxes away so we don't trip on them and maybe fall out of the boat just like that guy who said that he was fishing and then their trolling motor fell off the boat and then they went back to find it and they were trying to hook it with their poles and then they hooked it but it pulled their pole into the water and they didn't want to lose it but it made him lose his balance and he fell into the water and then when he got out he said someone was shooting at him and that he could tell it was a shotgun because he reached up and caught one of the pellets, so I make my way to the front of the boat and I'm casting over the windshield and on the one cast I hit my forearm on the windshield and my pole goes flying out of my hand and into the water and we tried to find it but we couldn't so I had to use the spare rod the rest of the week. So I cast out under the tree again and start working the PowerBait and I'm not getting anything for a while, so Walt starts asking about going fishin' in New York, taking the boat up there - of course we can do that now because I had to put a whole new motor on the boat, which broke down on the last trip, so I said OK what week did he have in mind and he thought we should go next week, so I said I'll have to check with the Boss (Mom) and see if we have anything scheduled already, so all of a sudden I start to get a hit, he picks it up the I pull up the slack and the sucker drops it, then nothing. Then Tommy made some smart ass comment about not being able to catch fish and I said "You've always been a smart ass, you and Michael, when you were kids you always were fishing, playing baseball, and sports, and making wisecracks, you guys never went out with girls in High School, and me and Walt used to wonder if you guys were gay or something but then you guys got girlfriends so I guess we were wrong", and then Walt says I think you're getting a hit, and sure enough my pole's going "boom, boom, boom-boom" up and down, so I start to set the hook and Tommy and Walt went running away, I'm not sure why, but I set the hook and he starts fighting and I can't see him but he's gotta be a big one and Tommy says "Do you got him or are you caught on the bottom" and then the the pole is still going "boom, boom, boom-boom" so I know I still got him, and then he starts coming in towards the shore and I finally get him to the shore and it's one of those god-damn eels and I get him onto the shore and he's just hanging there from the line and then Tommy says "nice catch Pop" and whacks him in the side with a stick and then the f---ing eel wraps himself all around my pole and I had to cut the line and unravel him from the pole and in the process he starts squirming around and I tried to get a-hold of him and broke my pole. I always hated that kid ! Him and that Dr. Dave, the one time I took him and Michael onto Lake Ontario and Dave rammed the boat into another boat, What, you never heard that story? Well, it was a few years ago, maybe eight years, or was it nine . . . (to be continued and continued and continued)