This Northern Pike, caught off our dock out back and down the hill in the Mississippi bayou, would have weighed in at 18.5 pounds if I would have had a scale and been brave enough to hoist the scaly, saber-toothed dinosaur.
Kate also asked whether I wanted her to take a picture of me holding it before I released it to join its relatives in the muddy waters. I passed on that opportunity — its teeth were HUGE — and just made it a tale of the tape on the ground before returning the scaly monster to the deep. Fortunately, Google sent me to a website that computes the weight based on the length, 40 inches in this case. (Google can tell you the DAMNDEST things, eh?)
Well, here I am already violating my vow to be brief, because the light just dawned, and I need to share an anecdote:
I always thought that Jack just had trouble pronouncing my name back when he was 1½ or 2. He didn’t seem to be able to spit out the three syllables of Papa Mike, like Vincent did, and he wouldn’t say just Mike, for some reason — probably as a show of respect, even at that young age.
So he settled on PikeMike, which remains my fave nickname to this day. And I still find it amazing the solutions that kids come up with to solve their problems.
And now I realize that Jack wasn’t tongue-tied but a genius — a psychic, even — who could see into the future, predicting that folks someday might acknowledge my Northern Pike prowess. I can just imagine that, after I’ve passed on to the fishing grounds in the sky, earthbound folks still will be talking about old PikeMike in the same breath as they recall legends such as Davy Crockett and another famous Mike: Mike Fink.
I think I’ll let the lad pick some lottery numbers for me, and I might even ask him when HE thinks the rapture will be. Why wait for all the others, after so many predictions have proved wrong over the years, when there's a psychic in the house?
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