Reeling Me In

There is a reason I wear earplugs when Dearly Beloved watches sports.  Unless it’s Dick Vitale, I can take the announcers.  I can even deal with DB’s moans of agony.   What I hate is hearing the sad stories… why this game means so much to the field goal kicker–the guy who had leukemia, lost his grandmother on his birthday,  and is supporting his mother and her seven blind sisters.  If he misses a kick,  DB and the kid move on,  but I’m still sobbing 30 minutes later.

It isn’t just me.  Our daughters won’t watch with him, either.

It’s baffling because he doesn’t like those dramatic segments NBC churns out about individual athletes during the Olympics, so how is it that he can always come up with a story of his own about a player in a game?

Perhaps reading about it in the sports section is different.

Yesterday we went to the beach on a glorious 70-degree day.  Bonding time?  Well, sort of.   He takes two and three-hour walks while I start whining about 30 minutes into it.   Our arrangement is that I keep the car keys so I can leave whenever I want and he walks home.

We walked south along the shore.   Everything was perfect until we saw this:

Idyllic scene, right?  Wrong.

DB launched into a story of thievery and skullduggery.  The guy in the left side of the picture is  a “spot thief.”  He hijacked it from The Flounder Man.

There is something about that particular area that is deeper, warmer, colder, faster, slower… I can’t remember which.  The Flounder Man found it such a good spot that he went there every day, using the hexagonal window of this house as a sight line to set his poles.

Hexagon window is not a hex.

Word of his success leaked out and one day The Flounder Man came out to find that  Meany Man had come early and stolen his space.  Dearly Beloved gave me all the tragic details, interspersed with asides like which fisherman has a nephew who is a wide receiver for his favorite ACC team and something about sand fleas.  Don’t ask.

A little bit of Ernest Hemingway, a lot of Jimmy Buffett.   At least Dick Vitale wasn’t giving the color commentary.

Dearly Beloved gets the fishing report.

We continued our stroll along the shoreline after the hexagon window tale.   DB spotted The Flounder Man, who wasn’t fishing–just observing–and his cousin and started talking about the catches that day.  I took this photo after I realized that the drum/spot/mullet report was going to keep him there awhile.

As I continued on down the beach without him,  a male voice behind me said, “Are you leaving him behind? “

I laughed.

“Yes, but I took a picture so I could remember where I left him.”

The friendly stranger turned out to be a visitor to this area and as we walked along,  he told me that he and his wife were visiting here because his son was an officer on the USS Gravely,  the magnificent new ship commissioned here this weekend.  The Gravely was named for the first African-American admiral in the US Navy.

The man was rightfully proud of his son, a graduate of the Naval Academy. As we walked along the beach–barefooted– he told me that he and his wife would be going back to the snows of upstate New York later in the week. They’d come down for the commissioning ceremony and would actually be taken on the destroyer as far as Norfolk.  Exciting, indeed.

In the meantime, DB was still back with the fisherman, discussing what was biting.  The Flounder Man looked down the beach,  then turned back somewhat anxiously to DB.

“That man just walked off with your wife.”

“That’s okay.  If they turn right up there at the restaurant bar,  I’ll run after her.”

Sure.  There’s probably a ballgame on the bar TV.