Ballad For My One True Love

I always made such a fuss over her.

My beloved.

I was 8 years old. My Mom had sent me to a six-week-long summer camp for crazy children (even though I was quite level-headed ... then -- but, boy, were those kids crazy). Visitation wasn't allowed.

Mom spent that time galavanting around with a guy from Fort Lauderdale. When they came to pick me up from crazy camp, they told me they were getting married. A few weeks later, they were.

He was a Navy vet, a firefighter, and he had a tattoo of a flag of Fort Lauderdale with a heroin spoon as the flag pole. In short, he was like every other guy she ended up with (well, thankfully except for my Dad).

They took me on their "honeymoon" to (where else?) Fort Lauderdale.

I'd never been out of South Carolina.

We headed across the Everglades to Naples to stay with my uncle and do some fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone was catching something that day. Mostly Sheepshead.

I had spent that whole hot, August day in 1982 watching everyone reel in fish after fish as my pole stayed frustratingly motionless, except for the little teases that come with the steady up-and-down sway of the sea waves.

I was upset. I had a bad temper. The adults celebrated incessantly in some kind of Masters Of The Sea circle jerk.

Then, I felt my line tug.

And there she was. Into my life.

My beloved. The Ladyfish.

How beautiful her name sounded. So elegant and exotic, just destined to be hooked by a sawed-off, gap-toothed conquistador like myself. I, too, was a Master Of The Sea.

We took the picture and stuck it in the photo album.

---

For the entirety of my teenage years, I showed that picture to anyone who had eyes to see.

Me and the guys would finish our shift bagging groceries at the Winn-Dixie and head down to the farm pond to fish. We'd usually catch at least a largemouth bass, maybe more. Sometimes we came back with nothing. No matter, whenever I got back to the apartment, I could always open up the photo album and gaze upon my Temptress of the Gulf.

Every now and then, I'd be watching television by myself. I'd see the album. I'd open it up and just ... stare.

You might say she was my first love.

---

My uncle had moved up to South Carolina not too long after I reeled her into my heart. He had to cut out of Naples abruptly. The words you heard when adults talked and underestimated your ability to understand was that my uncle was fixing airplanes for drug dealers.

As I grew older, I never talked with him much. He liked guns and motorcycles (and pointing out the muffler burns that branded his calves and the scars of skin-ripped knee caps). He embraced a necessity of violence. He also had a big heart (as hardened as it was) and an obsessive sense of justice.

That's why he kept 15 dogs and 11 cats on his property. The number changed depending on what animal was found along the roadside or what animal had to be put down after hundreds of dollars spent on medication or surgery on any particular day. I never looked forward to negotiating a maze of electric fences to keep this dog from that dog because this dog doesn't like these three dogs and this one's in heat and ...

I never talked with the guy from Fort Lauderdale, either, because he had taken off back to Fort Lauderdale without us.

Then one day I was 19. I was in college. It was October. It was cold. My uncle called me up to tell me he had a boat and wanted to go out for a day of fishing on Lake Murray.

The last time I went fishing with him, it was warm, the water was Kool-Aid, you could stand on the coral reefs and cast your line and ...

I went.

---

We were freezing. The water was choppy. The fish weren't feeling it.

But there was a time when they were. When we were the gods of the Seven Seas.

When ... she ... came into my life.

---

Speaking of the biting cold (and not of near-tropical, summertime Florida breezes):

There's that moment in the Coen brothers classic "Fargo" where Marge Gunderson is driving in the cold Minnesota snow and realizes she's been lied to.

It's a striking scene: A homely pregnant policewoman from eventless Brainerd, Minn., staring through the windshield, letting it all sink in, in a sobering moment of betrayal.

She's on a fact-finding mission in Minneapolis to investigate the murder of a policeman and innocent motorists in her hometown.

Marge happens to meet a former high school admirer who -- in an attempt to get her to sleep with him -- tells her his wife died of cancer. She believes gives him her sincerest condolences. She calls a friend the next day who tells her that the woman who was supposedly his wife wasn't his wife and didn't, in fact, die of cancer. Even more, she could call her up and talk if she'd like.

It's on the drive back that Marge digests it all. People lie. That's what Jerry Lundegaard -- the bumbling used-car salesman unwittingly behind all the suffering -- did. He lied to her about a missing car that was registered to his lot and used during the killings.

She heads back to the dealership. This time, she's intent on the truth. The used-car salesman bolts and her persistent investigative work brings about a solution -- and a moral -- to the movie's tragic end.

---

Marge Gunderson was a believer who, through betrayal, became a more-dogged seeker of truth.

I was -- at the age of 19, on a cold, wind-torn morning -- a disbeliever who, through a lifetime of betrayal, became a dogged seeker of myths.

I didn't want to know about things. At least not any more than I already did know about things.

I just wanted ... her. My sweet, exquisite, sublime Madonna.

---

"Damn, Eric, these fish aren't biting."

"I know ... but, hey, you remember down in Florida? That Ladyfish I caught?"

"Ladyfish?"

"Yeah. On your boat, down in Naples. All day I didn't catch anything. Then just as we were about to head back, I caught that Ladyfish."

"Oh, yeah. I remember that. I caught that fish. We hooked it on your line so you'd feel like you did something."

He laughed and cast his line out.

I threw mine out, too.

The line tugged as the water shifted.