Read Online Tales from the Dad Side by Steve Doocy - Free Book Online Page B

“You can’t milk a donkey if you don’t have a pail.”
    Climbing into the captain’s chair, I firmly gripped my faux steering wheel as my father and the farmer pushed it across the muck into the pond. It was a flawless launch, until the raft sank.
    Not expecting a dunking, I was grossed out beyond belief, having just sucked the brown water from the cattle watering hole down my mouth and nose. My immediate damage assessment was that I’d sprung a leak, because that’s how a second grader thinks, but in reality there was nothing to leak. It was supposed to float because that’s what wood does—I simply needed more wood.
    â€œMy first raft sank too,” my father lied. “Let’s tell Mom we hit an iceberg.”
    The farmer, my father, and I dragged the shipwreck from the muck and mire and brought it high enough up the bank to keep it from being a cow hazard. The last thing I remember Van Gogh saying afterabandoning ship was “You can put wings on a sheep, but it’s still not a duck.”
    I’d loved the idea of building a raft as my father had, but there was a reason the world didn’t use that form of water travel anymore: it was tricky and dangerous, and the widespread construction of rafts was most certainly best left to disgruntled Cubans.
    From that day I became leery of any rituals from bygone eras that might have been popular once but, given advancements in science and recreation, were hopelessly outdated. “Don’t make any plans for Saturday—I’ve signed you up for the father-son fishing derby,” my wife informed me a generation later. Another time-consuming and quasi-dangerous throwback to the golden days, but my wife convinced me that if I didn’t give my son a taste of some he-man activities, he’d wind up an adult child with few pastimes aside from folding cloth napkins into rabbits and hats.
    When I was his age I loved to fish; my grandmother and I would spend hours on the banks of the Upper Des Moines, waiting for a nibble. I don’t know if she really liked the sport or just wanted to chain-smoke Camels. My father was in charge of our bait. The night before a fishing expedition, Dad would turn on the garden hose and soak the grass, and presto, half an hour later, we’d go outside with flashlights and simply pick up the night crawlers that were luxuriating on the cool damp grass. These gargantuan worms were so big that if the fish didn’t bite at them, one could just punch a carp and knock it out cold.
    When my wife signed me up for the fishing derby, we were living where king-size worms were in short supply. Plus, I was always iffy about using a spade in New Jersey. “It’s okay, kids, it’s only Hoffa’s toe.”
    I tried my father’s hose trick, but Jersey worms have an attitude and won’t come out of their holes for water unless it’s San Pellegrino. Instead, I’d have to actually dig down into our garden to locate one. How does grass grow on concrete? I wondered after I turned over about two Advils’ worth of dirt before I laid hands on half a worm, seconds after my shovel performed an accidental wormectomy.
    â€œPick him up, Peter.”
    â€œHim?” My son was horrified that our bait had a gender. I reminded him that there were trophies involved, and he promptly deposited the mortally wounded half worm in our bait bucket.
    â€œDaddy, where are the fish?” was asked so many times in the derby’s first hour that at one point I turned to see if my son had recorded that query and was playing back a tape. I knew the problem was our lure: the bait had croaked on the way to the fishing derby.
    â€œPeter, look over there in those cattails for another worm.” Ten minutes later he returned with a real squirmy one that he insisted he put on the hook himself.
    â€œGood job, Pete!” I said loudly enough for the father and son next to us to hear. They